Sprint Corp. (S) on Tuesday reported a fiscal first-quarter loss of $20 million, after reporting a profit in the same period a year earlier.
Advertisement
SoftBank, the owner of Sprint, recently announced their earnings. Despite this drop, Sprint had a decent quarter, only losing 12,000 customers to other carriers compared to 620,000 in the year-ago quarter.
Sprint said that churn for its postpaid business – a measure of the amount of customers that left – fell to 1.56 percent from 2.05 percent a year earlier.
One area where the 2.5 GHz band is sure to find a welcome home is on Sprint’s planned small cells deployment, which the carrier said will include tens of thousands of sites over the next three years.
While those are positive signs, the company isn’t simply counting on its existing efforts to turn things around.
Based on such forecasts, SoftBank shares have lately been trading below 8 times forward earnings estimates, lagging behind multiples of over 10 for Japanese telecoms rivals KDDI Corp and NTT DoCoMo. The carrier followed that up with a $1.5 billion public offering of notes.
Son admitted that Sprint’s recent performance woes had dimmed his view on the U.S. operator, but that he was now back on board with bolstering Sprint’s operations.
The leasing company will purchase phones from vendors and lease them to customers, a Sprint spokesperson said.
“The bottom line is that I now see a path toward improvement”.
SoftBank will set up a similar facility for network equipment leasing, Son said.
Chief Executive Officer Marcelo Claure, who kickstarted a turnaround plan after taking on the top post at the company, said Sprint had cut costs more than it had expected.
Advertisement
While working to improve Sprint, SoftBank has also been stepping up investments in overseas tech startups.
