Aggressive discounts rolled out by Sprint may have helped the carrier add hundreds of thousands of new subscribers over the past few months, but the company is still losing money just like it has done over the past several quarters. Sprint Corp. earlier today announced that it posted a loss of $142 million on revenues of $8.25 billion during the July–September quarter. The numbers, however, are a major improvement over the same period last year, when the company lost a whopping $585 million on revenues of $7.98 billion. On EPS (Earnings per Share) terms, the loss amounts to about 4 cents per share, which is significantly lower than the 15 cents per share loss the company had posted during the same period last year.
Sprint also managed to beat market expectations with its Q2 numbers, as 14 analysts polled by Zacks Investment Research had reportedly predicted a loss of 7 cents per share on revenues of $8.03 billion. The carrier had earlier reported adding 347,000 postpaid net subscribers during the three month period, thanks largely to the various promotions it has been running over the past several months. In what seems to be another positive for the company, its postpaid churn for the latest quarter also fell to 1.52% from 1.54% a year ago. The carrier, however, continues to struggle with the perception that its network is inferior to those of its larger competitors – Verizon, AT&T and T-Mobile.
In a statement released to the media, the CEO of Sprint, Marcelo Claure, described the results as a positive for the company, saying that it is “another step forward in our plan toward sustainable profitability and cash generation”. Sprint also announced that the cost-cutting measures it has undertaken over the past twelve months have allowed it to reduce overheads by as much as $600 million on a year-on-year basis during the quarter in question. The company claims it is on track to cut at least $2 billion in operating expenses by the end of this fiscal year. As for its outlook going forward, the carrier says that it expects to earn between $1.2 billion and $1.7 billion in operating income during 2016. While Sprint’s shares declined 1.7% to $6.80 in pre-market trading today, they are up 91% from the beginning of the year.