With Sprint’s Q3 2014 results (yes Sprint does their fiscal year differently, it’s still the quarter ending in December though), it’s a mixed bag. There’s some good, and some bad. First we’ll take a look at some of the good to come out of that quarter, basically the first full quarter under new CEO, Marcelo Claure.
Sprint added 30,000 postpaid, 410,000 prepaid and 527,000 wholesale (from Virgin Mobile and Boost Mobile brands). That was just in that quarter, which put them just shy of the 1 million mark. And it sure looks like they are marketing their prepaid options a lot harder than their postpaid. This is the highest additions they’ve had in over 3 years. So great job there Marcelo. Additionally, Sprint’s 4G LTE network now covers over 270 million people in the US. However, adding that many new customers – as we saw with T-Mobile in 2014 – comes with a cost. Everyone ready for the bad news?
The company reported a $2.5 billion operating loss for the quarter. This includes non-cash charges of $2.1 billion; EBITDA of $1.04 billion. This is compared to $576 million operating loss a year ago. Revenue also fell 1.8 percent to just $8.97 billion. The company is adding connections, but that’s not keeping people from leaving. 205,000 people on Sprint’s postpaid plans left the carrier and got wireless service elsewhere this quarter. Which is actually a decrease from the quarter before, about 295,000 less. And year over year, that’s 202,000 less people leaving the Now Network.
So as usual with Sprint (and even T-Mobile given they are both smaller carriers with less subscribers and smaller networks) there’s always some good and some bad when it comes to earnings time. Overall it’s looking good for Sprint. It’ll be interesting to see what their new-ish CEO Marcelo Claure can do over the next year or so. Wonder if he can out perform T-Mobile’s CEO in his first year? It’ll be interesting to see.
How many of you are surprised by these quarterly numbers from Sprint? How many of you are not? Let us know your thoughts in the comments down below.