T-Mobile CEO John Legere has put out a blog post explaining why data presented by parties opposed to the in-progress Sprint and T-Mobile merger does not actually reflect the facts regarding layoffs, job creation, and other related stats.
In his post, Legere says that the New T-Mobile will be opening up new stores, expanding customer care efforts, and bringing overseas jobs to the United States, an effort that is projected to culminate in somewhere around 11,000 new jobs within this New T-Mobile by 2024. What’s more, many of the planned 600 new retail locations will be serving rural areas, small towns, and other typically under-served markets, helping to create jobs where they’re most needed.
To break all of those numbers down, New T-Mobile will be creating around 5,000 new retail jobs in total through its plans to open up new stores. The customer care team, meanwhile, will add somewhere around 5,600 customer care agents by 2021. That number is set to swell to 7,500 or more by 2024.
This is powered, in part, by an expansion of T-Mobile’s Team of Experts customer care strategy, which requires a higher staff to customer ratio than Sprint currently has, even counting cheaper overseas workers. T-Mobile and Sprint’s 130 million strong combined customer base, meanwhile, will not only be coming along for the ride, but is projected to grow, intensifying the new company’s projected need for more workers.
T-Mobile is projected to spend somewhere around $40 billion in the next few years on personnel and network expansion, helping to pay all those new staffers. This is part of a larger trend toward increased spending predictions as the 5G war looms large on the horizon, initial volleys already fired by some players. With T-Mobile and Sprint forced into competition with the much larger AT&T and Verizon, a merger is the most surefire way for the two companies to stay in step with the competition. This larger financial push has been predicted to result in the creation of some 3 million new jobs overall.
Job loss projections from some sources sit as high as 28,000, considering redundant staffers, agents at retail stores that will be closing, and other factors. Legere took these claims on directly in his post, calling them “made up”. He went on to cite T-Mobile’s 2013 purchase of prepaid carrier MetroPCS, a deal that was projected to result in the loss of over 10,000 jobs and instead created “tens of thousands” of new ones.
While many workers certainly stand to either lose their jobs or get shuffled around, if T-Mobile handles this the way that MetroPCS was handled, the numbers that Legere is laying out should hold true and perhaps even be exceeded.
That’s not to say that all is well. For starters, as regulatory stalling drags on, many analysts are lowering projected chances of the merger going through. This, of course, has a knock-on effect all its own in the market that could cause all sorts of unforeseen problems. Should things fall through, both smaller carriers are set to take quite the wallop from their larger competitors in terms of capital and the expenditure thereof.
Even if things should go as planned, there’s no real guarantee that T-Mobile will be able to recapture the success of the MetroPCS merger. Job losses, misplaced capex, and more issues could be in store in either case.