I don’t know if anyone has noticed, but our primary series NASCAR Cup sponsor, Sprint Nextel, posted a loss of $478 million in the 3rd quarter of 2009.
Sprint lost subscribers during the 3rd quarter that amounted to 545,000 customers. Meanwhile Verizon and AT&T gained subscribers.
If I weren’t a NASCAR fan, I wouldn’t care. After doing physical comparisons between cell carriers, I’ve been a Verizon customer. They just have better coverage overall, as far as my experiences have gone.
As Sprint looks to tackle these problems, they’re cutting the fat. And yet as I research this issue, I see this just didn’t happen overnight.
Sprint had to cut 6,000 jobs in January of ‘09, which was looked to save $just over $1 billion. This was a 14% force cut back then.
It also suspended salary increases and cut matching contributions for the surviving employees, to their 401k’s.
Now they’re looking to cut 2,500 more jobs from their workforce, as was announced earlier this week.
They lost $478 million. What happened to the $1 billion cost savings from the January cut? Ah, if you follow their efforts to put out their WiMAX network in conjunction with Clearwire, you’d see that’s where they tossed $1.176 billion. That’s what the employee cuts are amounting to.
This newest round of cuts is reported to be saving Sprint $350 million. Yet this move will also cost them almost $80 million in severance pay to these poor lost souls who will be looking for jobs.
How Does This Affect NASCAR?
So my question is this: When is NASCAR next? How does this affect their sponsorship status? Will we have a sponsor for the full tenure of the sponsorship contract or will they spend big bucks on big name actresses to pitch their product and start picking and choosing where their monies will continue to go?
That’s my question, as I sit here and worry about the little things, here at NASCAR Bits and Pieces.
references: Into Mobile, Into Mobile, Trading Markets.
