October 4th, 2007
It's about time dept.: Sprint CEO draws investor heat
Now, finally, a dissident SprintNextel shareholder with quite a bit of clout is expressing some very public discontent about how the company is being run.
Very public, as in an interview with two Wall Street Journal reporters posted today.
“We have lost confidence in (SprintNextel CEO) Gary Forsee,” Ralph Whitworth tells the WSJ.
Instructive to note that Whitworth’s firm, Relational Investors LLC, holds about 53.1 million shares, or roughly 1.9% of Sprint’s shares.
While calling for a board shakeup rather than Forsee’s immediate parachute out, Whitworth added to the WSJ that he lost faith in Forsee “primarily because of management’s inability to forecast the company’s results and their apparent inability to address the fundamental issues surrounding the core business.”
Well, duh. I have been writing some of these same inabilities for nearly two years.
I’ve written on and on in this blog about why I think SprintNextel is poorly led.
No VoIP strategy except for being a bundled-in partner. Failure thus far to acquire Vonage. Heck, did they even think about SunRocket?
From billing and customer service inefficiencies to back-end integration, a really lousy job at integrating Nextel with Sprint. Even “just” as a consumer, I had enough. So when my two-year SprintNextel BlackBerry contract expired Sept.12- I did not renew. And churn like that is said to spike once more when SprintNextel releases their 3Q results later this month.
Rather than jumping in and fixing these problems NOW, Sprint seems hellbent on deploying Wi-MAX as the magic bullet.
Oh, and did I mention the idiotic, politically tone deaf decisions this summer to terminate customers who asked too many questions of customer “service?”
So when I read reports such as this about Forsee being in the hot seat, I mumble to myself, AFT.
And I don’t mean the American Federation of Teachers.
Russell Shaw is an enterprise computing journalist, analyst and author based in Portland, Oregon. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
