After years of struggling and losing the title of the third largest wireless carrier in the United States, things are finally looking up for Sprint. Earlier this year, Sprint reported highest postpaid net adds in almost a decade and increased its liquidity to almost $11 billion in order to prepare for investments in 2.5GHz network equipment. Today, reports emerged that Sprint is about to beat the average quarterly operating revenue forecast by approximately 3%.
According to preliminary financial results posted by the US wireless carrier a few hours ago, the number of postpaid customers it managed to attract with its numerous promotions is the main reason behind the continuous growth achieved during the second quarter of the company’s fiscal year which was concluded on September 30th. More specifically, in a span of just three months, Spring added 347,000 new postpaid subscribers to its network. This is obviously extremely good news for the wireless carrier seeing how customers who foot their mobile phone bill at the end of the month statistically spend more and generally have a lower tendency to switch providers. For added context, the number of new postpaid subscribers which Sprint attracted in its last quarter is almost twice as big than the same figure in the first quarter of the year.
As for the aforementioned operating revenue, Sprint beat the average $8.02 billion estimate as its own preliminary results cite $8.25 billion in earnings before interest and taxes. The company’s net loss consequently fell to “only” $142 million, which is a 75.7% improvement over the previous quarter. While that’s yet to be officially confirmed, it’s likely that these achievements were mostly enabled by Sprint’s “half-off” promotion. So, despite the US market becoming increasingly saturated and competitive, Sprint obviously still has what it takes to draw some customers back to its own service. The Softbank-owned company also estimated an improved rate of user defection as it stated that only 1.37% of its subscribers switched providers in the three-month period which ended on September 30th.
It’s worth noting that not all of the preliminary financial results are good news for the fourth largest US carrier as Sprint estimates a significant loss of over 400,000 prepaid customers during the same period. In any case, we should have a clearer picture once the wireless carrier posts its official results on October 25th.