Sprint is laying off 829 at Overland Park campus

Sprint Corp. has given layoff notices to 829 employees at its Overland Park campus in the past 90 days, the company said late Friday in a filing with the Kansas Department of Commerce.

Substantial job cuts have been expected since early October when Sprint announced a $2.5 billion cost-cutting plan, but the company hadn’t released any numbers until Friday. The number of layoffs in operations outside the Kansas City area still hasn’t been disclosed.

Michelle Boyd, a Sprint spokeswoman, said about 6,000 employees would remain at the Overland Park campus after the job cuts, some of which won’t take effect right away.

“Job reductions are never an easy thing to do, and we don’t make these decisions lightly,” Boyd said. “We value and support our employees and are committed to assisting them through this transition with separation benefits and outplacement services.”

Boyd said the layoffs were across Sprint’s various operations in Overland Park, including part of its customer care call center.

She said the affected employees would be eligible for the company’s current severance package, which generally gives two weeks’ pay for each year employed plus $1,000. After this month, the severance terms will be reduced to one week’s pay for each year worked.

The notice, filed with the state under a federal law designed to give workers more notice when there are mass layoffs, was posted long after markets closed. In trading Friday, Sprint shares had jumped nearly 15 percent, their best day in five months, rising 37 cents a share and closing at $2.87.

That came in reaction to the company saying it was moving up its next earnings announcement to Tuesday, a week earlier than originally planned. That report is expected to show Sprint closed 2015 with its first full year of subscriber gains in eight years, analysts said.

“Sprint is slowly improving; possibly not quickly enough to get out of the way of the balance sheet, but we don’t see any near-term liquidity issues,” Phil Cusick, an analyst with JPMorgan Chase & Co., wrote in a note Friday.

While Sprint has added subscribers in the past few quarters using promotions, it has also burned through about half its cash and other more liquid cash equivalents.

The company had about $2 billion of cash and short-term investments on its books at the end of September, which is about equal to the debt maturing it has to refinance in 2016, a year that so far has been tough for bond issuers.

The layoffs announced Friday are part of the second wave of cost-cutting since Marcelo Claure became Sprint’s CEO. His first wave eliminated $1.5 billion in costs and included job reductions totaling 2,000. But fewer than 200 of those job cuts were at headquarters, according to other filings Sprint made with the state.

This story was originally published January 22, 2016 at 8:03 PM with the headline "Sprint is laying off 829 at Overland Park campus."