Likely: a big change in the employee stock option program, currently pretty worthless
Sprint employees have been notified of a “mandatory meeting” following close of business on Wednesday 31 March, according to the mobile blog The Boy Genius Report.
UPDATE #2 [3/31/10] Another reader, intheknow, in his comment below makes a critical distinction: he says there IS a meeting, but it’s not for all-employees, but for Sprint’s retail employees. “This “Meeting” was not made public to the entire company, only to retail so I am leaning towards it being a new phone or plan. An All Hands Meeting is NOT scheduled,” he writes. If that’s the case, it could very well indicate a product-related announcement, contrary to my original assessment.
UPDATE #1: A reader, jatrudel, in his comment below provides a link [Thanks jatrudel!] to a Kansas City Business Journal news story that suggests a far more likely reason than announcing, say, the availability of the iPhone: a big change in the employee stock option program. Currently, Sprint employees hold options that are essentially worthless, since the price of the options is far more than the company’s current stock price. The idea behind options is that they gain value for the person who holds them if the stock price rises. Sprint’s stock price has been sinking. According to KCBJ, Sprint filed proxy information with the SEC on Monday, saying that management will shareholder approval for the change at the upcoming May 11 annual meeting.
In his original post at BGR about the rumor, Michael Bettiol says he’s been told of the meeting by “several employees” who said they’d received a memo about the news, which will be announced internally after Sprint stores close for the day.
Refreshingly, Bettiol freely admits he has no idea what the announcement is about. He speculates it could be related to the recent announcement of an Android-based HTC smartphone, called EVO 4G, which carries a dual-radio chipset, so it can work over cellular or WiMAX networks. It’s the first U.S. smartphone for WiMAX. Sprint is a key partner in Clearwire’s rollout of nationwide WiMAX coverage.
Sprint’s spec sheet for EVO is online. The team at AndroidCentral collected answers to a flock of reader questions about the EVO. Network World’s Brad Reed has a comparison of EVO and another big-screened Android phone, the Google Nexus One, also designed by HTC.
A lot of the comments to Bettiol’s blogpost center on speculation that Sprint’s senior management will use the meeting to unveil one or more new mobile handsets.
I don’t know how Sprint has done it in the past, but to me that seems unlikely. I think it’s more probable that it will be business related.
