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.
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Still, that failed to top T-Mobile US Inc’s 58.9 million subscribers, moving Sprint to the fourth position among U.S. carriers.
When Legere made the prediction last August, he had no idea that his next-closet competitor was gearing up for a massive offensive, by offering a somewhat similar game play to T-Mobile’s, including cut-rate plans and aggressive advertising campaigns targeting Verizon and AT&T. Back in February, Roger Cheng of Cnet observed that Sprint actually counts prepaid subscribers who may or may not still be on the network (because their accounts were sold through third-party retailers and haven’t been active for six months). A year ago, they were trading at $7.45.
Sprint also neared its goal of turning positive in terms of core smartphone subscribers, losing just 12,000 such customers in the quarter, as compared to the several hundred thousand or millions that it had been ceding in prior quarters. The company’s postpaid churn reached a record low 1.56 percent.
The company added a net 675,000 customers in the quarter ended June 30, helped by discounts and offers such as doubling data capacity. As noted by Recode, Sprint has hired a new CFO and COO to serve under CEO Marcelo Claure, who was installed as chief executive after Softbank’s purchase of the company.
Earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization was $2.08 billion in the fiscal first quarter ended in June, Overland Park, Kansas-based Sprint said Tuesday.
Revenue fell 8.7% to $8.03 billion, while analysts had forecast revenue of $8.31 billion.
And while T-Mobile taking over the number three carrier spot in the US doesn’t mean that you’re going to immediately see a better cell connection or anything like that, it’s still big for T-Mobile and John Legere and is evidence of the effectiveness of the Un-carrier moves.
“We are confident in our plan to leverage our unique spectrum assets to make our network a competitive advantage, aggressively reduce operating costs, and utilize our business relationships and assets to fund our turnaround”, Claure said.
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Chief network officer John Saw was promoted to chief technology officer.
1 Comment on this Post
Lee
I don’t think employees in ATT, Verizon and Sprint have to worry that their director might take their job and give it to their friend, if they try to do honest job.
It is a organization can’t be honest to their own employees, how they will do anything good for their customer.