After seeing Samsung’s quarterly earnings last night, and how great they were. I mean they brought in about $7 billion in profit in just three months, that’s pretty amazing. And now we are here talking about Sprint. The company posted an operating income of $420 million which is the best they’ve had in nearly seven years. So there is a silver lining here. But here comes the bad news. The third largest carrier posted a loss of $151 million in the first quarter alone. However, that is down from the first quarter of 2013, so that’s a plus.
Sprint also lost about 231,000 customers during the first quarter, thanks to some outages while they were upgrading equipment and working on their network. That was just postpaid, as prepaid also posted a net loss of about 364,000 customers this quarter. The changes in prepaid customers were primarily due to the changes in the Lifeline certification process. Affecting those that used Assurance Wireless.
On another good note, Sprint also announced that nearly 3 million people are on the Sprint Framily Plan. Which is good for the carrier – even though I still don’t really like the name – and Sprint is extending the Framily plan to more retailers. It just recently became available at Radioshack and Best Buy, so we should see higher numbers when we see Q2 numbers in about 3 months.
While it may not look good for Sprint right now, I’m sure it’s going to turn around for them pretty soon. Since they do have the financial backing of Softbank and they are doing a great job with 4G LTE, at least in some areas. Things like this take time though, and the Sprint Chairman, who’s also the Softbank CEO, is looking to change the US wireless industry as well. So now we have two execs, Masayoshi Son, and John Legere, who are shaking up the industry. Which is a good thing for consumers, I think.