Sprint Nextel shareholder seeks change at beleaguered carrier

Shares of Sprint Nextel Corp. inched upward following a Wall Street Journal report that shareholder Ralph Whitworth is pushing for major changes at the carrier.
Whitworth has quietly accumulated about half a billion shares in the wireless industry’s No. 3 operator, or nearly 1 percent of the company, through his $6.7 billion firm Relational Investors, the Journal reported. And he has called for Sprint Nextel to pull back its capital investment and lobbied for a potential sale of the operator’s fiber-optic networking and long-distance operation.
Whitworth is surely not the only displeased Sprint Nextel investor, of course. The carrier has seen its shares lose more than 25 percent since Sprint Corp. closed its $35 billion acquisition of Nextel Communications Inc. in August 2005, as competitors Cingular and Verizon Wireless increased their market capitalization substantially.
A representative from Sprint Nextel declined a request for comment from RCR Wireless News following the Journal report. Sprint Nextel shares climbed 54 cents, or almost 3 percent, to $19.73 following the report.