Since Sprint replaced Dan Hesse as their CEO in 2014 and placed Marcelo Claure as their CEO, they’ve made a bit of a turnaround. Although it’s still a little too early to see what all Claure has changed at Sprint. Yesterday, T-Mobile announced their preliminary Q4 numbers. They added 2.1 million customers. Sprint was quick to respond in saying that they added nearly 1 million customers. So Sprint keeps their #3 spot, but the gap has narrowed down to around 1 million between the two carriers. Sprint was also happy to report that they added more prepaid customers then T-Mobile. Sprint added over 400,000 prepaid net adds. While T-Mobile was around 266,000. I think Sprint was proud of that because recently T-Mobile became the largest prepaid carrier after Sprint had been the largest for nearly a decade. They want that title back, obviously.
It wasn’t all great news for Sprint, as Claure did admit that Sprint still has the highest churn rate among the four carriers. For those unaware, Churn rate is the number of customers leaving compared to those coming to the carrier. Claure said they are working hard to fix this issue. However, Claure did also note that Sprint had a great December and dramatically reduced the churn rate for that month. And hope to continue that in the future.
As far as Sprint’s promotions like their “Cut your bill in half” promo, it’s been very successful. Claure says their message has really worked well with this advertising campaign. “We are going to get away from gigabytes or ‘my network is better than your network.’ Come over and cut your bill in half.”
It’s great to see Sprint really improving in such a short period of time. But as with T-Mobile, Sprint really needs to work on their network. While Root Metrics did rank them #2 in Chicago for reliability, its not the same story everywhere. Which is going to be an issue as they start adding more and more subscribers in the coming quarters. It’s an issue that T-Mobile and Sprint have been facing for a while – T-Mobile a bit more than Sprint, actually.
How many of you are excited to see Sprint’s future? Let us know in the comments below.