Sprint, Posts Wider Loss, Sees Subscriber Improvement
Sprint Nextel added 644,000 customers in Q3, the most customers it added in a quarter in four years, for a total of 48.8 million. It also posted the first quarterly revenue increase in three years. But the carrier reported a wider loss of $911 million compared with a year-ago loss of $478 million. The company expects to continue to gain subscribers overall in Q4 and looks for trends to improve in both postpaid and prepaid businesses. The carrier intends to move to a single network, CEO Dan Hesse said in a conference call Wednesday.
Sign up for a free preview to unlock the rest of this article
Timely, relevant coverage of court proceedings and agency rulings involving tariffs, classification, valuation, origin and antidumping and countervailing duties. Each day, Trade Law Daily subscribers receive a daily headline email, in-depth PDF edition and access to all relevant documents via our trade law source document library and website.
Sprint added about 364,000 retail subscribers and some 280,000 wholesale and affiliate subscribers. The iDEN network lost more than 383,000 customers during the quarter. Sprint gained a net 471,000 prepaid subscribers vs. the 173,000 prepaid net additions in Q2. The carrier now has 48.8 million customers. Although momentum continues, the company has much progress still to make, Hesse said.
The company has been in talks with Clearwire about Clearwire’s financing options, Hesse said. Talks don’t guarantee funding and there were other options available, he said. “We do have alternatives that we would consider.” The WiMAX operator is exploring options for additional funding and some analysts had said there are few options beyond Sprint.
A network modernization plan is underway at Sprint to help reduce costs and give the company technology flexibility, Hesse said. The biggest margin issue is the cost associated with running two networks, he acknowledged. It will take a while to implement the modernization plan, so the carrier won’t see the benefits until 2012, he said. “We would go from multiple networks to one network.” A significant component of the plan is the reallocation of a portion of available iDEN spectrum for CDMA services, a spokesman said. He said the carrier had are no immediate plans to force migrate iDEN customers to the CDMA network.