Sprint just announced their quarterly earnings, being the last carrier to do so for the quarter. The company added 675,000 net customers. Which means they added the least amount of the big four. T-Mobile and AT&T added 2.1M net and Verizon at 1.1M net. Which means Sprint is officially the smallest carrier in the US, but not by a whole lot. Currently, Sprint is sitting at 56.8 million customers with T-Mobile at 58.9 million.
Sprint lost just 12,000 postpaid customers in the quarter, which is actually pretty good Sprint. Considering they were losing close to half a million about a year ago. Sprint also reported a net loss of $20 million, which equaled about a cent per share. Better than analysts expectation of the company losing 8 cents per share. Additionally, their operating revenue was $8 billion and that’s down 9% year over year. This is likely due to more customers buying their phones with monthly installments.
“Over the past year, Sprint has made meaningful progress in our turnaround by improving our network performance and enhancing our overall value proposition,” said Sprint CEO Marcelo Claure in the earnings press release. “As a result, we hit significant milestones during the quarter by posting the company’s lowest-ever churn and recording postpaid phone net additions in both May and June, as well as for a third consecutive month in July. Going forward, 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.”
Sprint did post the lowest churn in their history, being around 1.56, which is a 49 point difference from the previous quarter. This is something that we’ve been hearing more and more about from the carriers in recent years. Sprint is changing their financial outlook for the fiscal year 2015 (this is their Q1 2015). And is raising their EBITDA from their previous expectations of about $6.5-6.9 billion to $7.2-7.6 billion. The company also is expecting that the fiscal year 2015 will have cash capital expenditures around $5 billion. That excludes the impact of leased devices sold through indirect channels.
Sprint will be doing their earnings call shortly, so we might hear more about what Sprint is doing with their network as well as how customers have been sticking around with them. While they did lose 12,000 postpaid customers in the quarter, that’s still a huge turnaround for them.