This week, Sprint’s CEO Marcelo Claure is speaking at his first investors conference as the CEO of Sprint. And he has some pretty interesting things to say. I’ll tell you now that Sprint has a CEO you’ll want to listen too. As much as I love listening to John Legere’s talks and his Uncarrier events, Claure is a lot like Legere, but he has a steeper hill to climb, at this point anyways. Claure said that he will be trimming the fat, so to speak. Getting rid of business ventures that are “nice to haves” and not required to keep the company running. As Sprint is losing money in most quarters – Q2 was the exception. And right now Claure’s two main points are to make money and to add customers. Obviously adding customers will lead to making money as long as the company doesn’t spend money and needless things.
Claure also sort of stated, that there would be some changes to his existing management team. He wants people that are “up for the ride”. And this is very common when a new CEO takes over a company. They usually bring in their own people to run the company as well. Legere did the same thing with T-Mobile when he joined magenta a couple years ago. Claure still thinks that the US wireless industry needs some consolidation, and is disappointed that their proposed buyout of T-Mobile USA was blocked – for all intents and purposes – by the FCC.
One of the first things that Claure did when he took over was to speak with the over 2,000 Sprint dealers nationwide and get some feedback on their Framily plans. And well the feedback wasn’t good considering they’ve dropped the Framily plan now. “Dealers said it was hard to sell. We are marketing a hamster talking to people,” Claure stated. “That’s very hard to sell.” And from a journalist standpoint, it was hard to explain what a Framily plan was to our readers, and even our own family members when they ask what we think of Sprint’s new plans. They were just so confusing. And their newer plans are much less confusing, thankfully.
Claure did commend his competitors though. Saying that AT&T and Verizon have done a great job at marketing their family plans and their networks. Which are really good networks in most areas. He also commended T-Mobile saying that they have done a “phenomenal job” at disrupting the industry, and said that they won’t be sitting back and watching his competitors take all the customers. “We are now the disrupters in the industry,” Claure said.
I very much, look forward to Sprint becoming a disrupter in the industry. I’ve loved just about everything that T-Mobile has done with the Uncarrier stuff, and it’ll be interesting to see what Claure and Sprint has in store to disrupt the industry next, because I think Legere and T-Mobile are running out of ideas now.