He will be replaced by Tarek Robbiati, most recently the CEO of FlexiGroup Ltd., an Australian consumer-finance company. Sprint has a mean target price of $7.28 per share, which represents a whopping 106% potential return.
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Of course there’s still a massive chasm between T-Mobile and the No. 2 spot now held by AT&T. During the quarter, it reported EBITDA of $2.1 billion.
Sprint added 675,000 subscribers, helped by tablet sales. Prepaid churn went the opposite direction, surging from 4.44% last year to 5.08% this year, highlighting the increasingly competitive nature of the prepaid market. Sprint noted that despite the full quarter results, it managed to post net phone additions for both May and June.
The turnaround has taken a toll on Sprint’s balance sheet. In contrast, T-Mobile US Inc. But now that Sprint has released its latest earnings report, which details its total number of wireless subscribers, Legere can finally pop open the champagne and celebrate capturing… a distant third place behind Verizon Wireless and AT&T. That is a huge improvement from the 2.05% churn rate experienced by Sprint during last year’s second quarter.
The carrier’s shares rose 3.6 percent in premarket trading. That compares to a loss of 620,000 in the prior-year period. The number of its postpaid subscribers – who pay at the end of the month – also increased by 1 million in quarter ending June 2015.
Under Chief Executive Marcelo Claure, the company has been reducing costs, trimming staff and adding stores. The company is focusing to improve quality of its network, data speeds, quality of phone calls, and reliability of text messages. Net operating revenue fell to $8.03 billion from $8.79 billion.
Thanks to such offers, Sprint had record-low customer defections in its postpaid business. The average estimate of nine analysts surveyed by Zacks Investment Research was for a loss of 8 cents per share.
T-Mobile and Sprint have been locked in a dead-heat race in recent months over who will be the nation’s third-largest carrier.
Sprint said it now had 57.7 million customers. To compare, T-Mobile ended its Q2 2015 – which also wrapped on June 30 – with 58.9 million total subscribers.
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Still, Sprint faces some big challenges ahead: It doesn’t have a lot of money to spend, and analysts say it must upgrade its network significantly to compete.
