While we enjoyed the distinction of earning ourselves the reputation of being the largest wireless communications and service provider within the U.S. in 2014, we also had other plans.
The plans were to bring about these layoffs and job cuts at the end of the year. But the layoffs were to be only 1% of the entire workforce currently employed by the company. We had a staff of 178,500 committed employees as per the company records dated till the 30th of September, as estimated for a regulatory filing.
Thus. by the end of the year, we decided to lay off 1000 employees. This strategy was adopted as a plan of action for improving the business efficiency of our enterprise. We had to opt for job cuts in light of the lower profits which were reported, in contrast to the expected returns within the third quarter of the year.
The profits continued to suffer as more subscribers derived benefit from the discounts on different devices. The cost of our sales and services increased by 24.6% as a result of the high subsidy costs and though we added 1.5 million customers in the postpaid segment within the third quarter, and it amounted to a 60% increase over a year, we realized that the growth would in fact, not sustain in the fourth quarter of the year.
We also had the intention to maintain our premium pricing. But since we offered the highest margins, we also had to offer discounts to compete within the industry. We had the goal to urge our customers to move to installment plans rather than opting for a subsidy based program, and for this, we had to offer incremental benefits to the customers along with those service program options, to incite them towards these options.
With competitors offering services at affordable prices, we needed to offer additional benefits to ensure that our market share did not drop and to attract customers away by only using subsidized service programs.
That is why we had to opt for a layoff of 1000 employees in the last quarter of 2014, so that we could fund and inspire customers by offering them attractive benefits with our different services that involved installment plans, to ensure better profits and improved system efficiency.