But T-Mobile can be very generous when it wants. Ask the shareholders
T-Mobile has announced the first-ever dividend program for its shareholders. The company will pay dividends of $3.75 billion over the next five quarters. The company also intends to buy back $15.25 billion of its shares.
CEO Mike Sievert told Yahoo Finance that the company is “outperforming this whole sector on growth.” He says that investors should continue to expect industry-leading earnings growth and cash flow generation.
This is sure to leave a sour taste in the mouths of the 5,000 employees who were let go last month and another estimated 5,000 who were allegedly terminated in 2020.
So why are shareholders being rewarded while 5,000 employees had to lose their jobs?
Well, Sievert says that it’s not like the company lays people off every year. He explains that after 3.5 years of its merger with Sprint and doing a “historic network build,” there’s a lot of duplication. He says that this decision was made to improve the company’s efficiency and reclaim the speed, decisiveness, and characteristics that made it successful in the first place.
Those words sound logical, even if a little cold. But when you consider T-Mobile’s promise of adding more jobs after its acquisition of Sprint, the words only sound hollow and insensitive. At that time, then-CEO John Legere said that the merger was all about creating new, high-quality, high-paying jobs. He stated that the company planned to add millions of new customers and that it would need a lot of people to provide support to new customers.
