Introduction and Company Overview.

The Sprint Nextel Company is a relatively new bond that appeared in 2005 from the acquisition of Nextel Communications by the company that is titled Nextel. Despite the short period of existence of Sprint Nextel there are many decades of history of both companies that distinguish them in the sphere of US communications and provision of internet services. It is a public company that employs more than 50,000 employees and manages to provide its services of the highest quality for many years not only on the territory of the US but worldwide as well. The company’s headquarters are situated in Kansas and the creation of the company is credited to Clayson Brown (the founder of Sprint) and Morgan O’Brien (the founder of Nextel).

Sprint Nextel appeared relatively not long ago, but it is still necessary to remember that its history and significance in the telecommunications market is still grand despite the fact that these two companies existed separately and achieved their success this way as well. Before the merger both of them constituted the most reliable, popular and widely used internet and telecommunications operators that enjoyed high popularity with the majority of the US population. However, to get a better idea about the Sprint Nextel Company in its contemporary outlook, it is essential to consider more than a century of its activities and existence.

The Sprint Company exists for more than one century and was founded in 1899 when the founder, Clayson Brown, achieved the merger between his Brown Telephone Company and the Bell monopoly in Kansas (Milestone Events Making Sprint History: 1899 – 1989). Since then the company began to develop and adopted a very aggressive strategy of growth and development by which it managed to go much further than the majority of its competitors and come to the fore in the sphere of local telephone provision. However, it was not the end of the independent development of the company – in 1993 it merged with Centel and developed an innovative, extended range of provided services, going farther from only local telephones and providing long-distance calls services as well as wireless telephoning services, which was a real breakthrough for it (Milestone Events Making Sprint History: 1899 – 1989).

The Nextel Company’s development was also vivid and remarkable throughout the end of the 20^th century. It was founded in 1993 and specialized in internet services provision – before that the company was titled Fleet Net. The tempos of growth of the renamed company cannot help arousing excitement:

“In less than year’s time, Nextel merged with Dial Call and OneComm, acquired all of Motorola’s SMR licenses in the U.S., and received a $1 billion investment from wireless pioneer Craig McCaw. By mid-1995, Nextel was on point to serve all of the nation’s top 50 markets” (Milestone Events Making Sprint History: 1899 – 1989).

At the present moment the company after the merger represents a huge provider of all kinds of telephoning and internet services, thus occupying the first place in the US market and constantly expanding the influence further in the world. There are a huge number of the company’s subsidiaries that have also won a good, trusted name and a lot of fame in the eyes of consumers. As a few examples of its subsidiaries one should consider US Unwired, Gulf Coast Wireless, the IWO Holdings or Alamosa PCS (Sprint Nextel Corporation, Google Finance). Besides, it is important to mention the Sprint Partners Alliance – it is a group of companies that work under the name of Sprint and sell their services, but do this under the license of Sprint. They are known as “Sprint Rural Alliance” (SRA) and produce a large share of the company’s revenues.

Surely, the company even being at the fore of the telecommunications and internet connection services may have a set of influential competitors who represent the main threat in the course of market distribution. In the situation of Sprint Nextel, the major competitors who have to be mentioned in the analysis are Verizon Wireless, AT&T Mobility, T-Mobile, U.S. Cellular in the sphere of wireless communications and Line 3 Communications in the international IP communication (Sprint Nextel Corporation, Google Finance).