Sprint and External Environment

It is very critical for organization to understand the importance of external environment, which includes remote, operating and industrial environments before developing its future objective. Each environment bases on different factors, therefore the analysis of external environment will help the company seeks for new opportunity in many areas as well as discovering challenges that might have direct impact to the organization in the future. The remote environment consists of the study of the economic trend such as the level of disposable income, inflation rate and prime rate, the study of social factors such as life style of consumers. The political factor also plays an important role in external environment. Political factor focuses on the legal and regulation that has direct impact on the organization. Besides remote environment, the operating environment also provides important information that will assist the company's development plan in the future. The operating environment concentrates on the new and existing competitors. Understanding the level of competitiveness in the market will help the company develop its future tactics to compete with others in the industry. Besides studying the competitor, the operating environment also concentrates on the customer profile. The study of buyer behavior will assist company in developing new product.

Economic factor has major influence in the Sprint's objective in term of future investment as well as price setting for its products. Social factor is also one of the remote environments that have great impact on Sprint. The need of cellular phones has been increasing from the past. In the past decade, cell phones were merely be used and carried by upscale businessmen and people value them as the luxury items. However, in the recent year, cell phones are viewed as one of the necessary item as people are now more and more attached to the cell phones in their lifestyles. In the next five years, people will even more integrate cell phones for the entertainment purposes; watching video feed, live movies, and online games. Sprint realized these predicted changes; the company has long term plans and objectives to support consumers' needs. For instance, Sprint has set a joint ventures agreement with various cable companies to provide TV services for customers anywhere and anytime. For this, Sprint has also started improving its network infrastructure to include high speed data services in order to support enormous data applications.

The ultimate goal of every wireless company is to minimize its coverage-hole area, which can be done by adding more cell tower. However, the major challenge is to deal with the political factor - zoning. In the area where residences of the community are eager to preserve land and historical values is most likely very difficult for Sprint to place its cell tower equipment. In the next five years, zoning will be even more difficult for Sprint to fill-in those coverage holes. Sprint has long term strategy to face with this unavoidable challenge. The company expects to spend more time and money in constructing visual-friendly stealth structures, i.e. stealth trees and vaulted equipment