T-Mobile laying off 5,000 employees

T-Mobile plans to lay off close to 5,000 employees, about 7 percent of its workforce, by the end of September, the company’s president and CEO said in an email to employees Thursday.

The layoffs will primarily affect corporate, back-office and technology roles, while retail and other customer-facing roles “will not be impacted,” Mike Sievert, T-Mobile’s president and CEO, said in the email disclosed in a Securities and Exchange Commission filing.

Sievert noted that the impacted positions are “primarily duplicative to other roles” or no longer align with changing systems, processes and “company priorities.” He also said T-Mobile does not plan on making additional cuts in the near future.

“This is a large change, and an unusual one for our company. We’re tackling the tough decisions now, because I wanted to make sure that people working here are not wondering what’s next, after this process concludes,” Sievert said. “Because of this, we do not envision making additional large-scale reductions across the company again in the foreseeable future.”

In his explanation for the company’s restructuring, he pointed to increased customer demands following T-Mobile’s merger with Sprint in 2020 as well as the high cost of bringing in and maintaining customers.

“What it takes to attract and retain customers is materially more expensive than it was just a few quarters ago,” Sievert said in Thursday’s email. “We’ve been out-running this trend by accelerating merger synergies, and building our high-speed Internet business faster than expected, and out-performing in a few other areas.” 

“However, it is clear that doing everything we are doing and just doing it faster is not enough to deliver on these changing customer expectations going forward,” he added.

T-Mobile is the latest company to announce layoffs, following a string of mass cuts that have largely impacted the tech sector.