Dish Network is issuing pink slips to more than 500 employees at its legacy satellite service, streamer Sling TV and Dish Wireless divisions, a company spokesperson confirmed this week.
The layoffs come as Dish seeks to address various pain points in its business after the company reported lackluster financial results during its third fiscal quarter of the year, which included further erosion in its satellite and streaming pay television services.
“Like most businesses, we continually evaluate and make adjustments to ensure we’re set up for long-term success,” Meredith Diers, a spokesperson for Dish, said on Wednesday. “We made the difficult decision to part ways with some team members due to changing business demands on some teams. Impacted employees will be notified by the end of the week.”
Dish says it has already started notifying various local and state offices about the layoffs, as it is required to do under Colorado law. The company is based in Meridian, a suburb of Denver.
On Monday, Dish Network revealed it lost around 64,000 pay television subscribers to its Dish-branded satellite service and Sling TV. The majority of the losses were concentrated at Dish, where the company has steadily increased prices in order to offset higher programming-related costs. More than 181,000 customers left Dish during Q3, offsetting subscriber gains at Sling TV, the company’s financial disclosures revealed.
Dish is in the process of continuing to build out its 5G wireless network, which also saw subscriber losses during Q3. Around 228,000 retail wireless customers left Dish during the period, leaving it with 7.5 million subscriber accounts, down from 8 million that was revealed during Q3 2022.
Its business woes helped contribute to a $138.8 million loss during Q3, fully erasing the $410.8 million profit Dish saw during the same period last year. Its revenue was reported at $3.7 billion for the quarter, down from $4.1 billion reported last year.
The lackluster financial results caused Dish’s stock price to slip more than 30 percent, according to Bloomberg.
