Sprint has been a real issue for SoftBank and CEO Masayoshi Son, since he bought the company in 2013. Sprint has been hurting the company’s bottom line, until now. SoftBank announced their earnings for the quarter earlier this week and mentioned that Sprint is no longer a drag on their bottom line. Now, Son is stating that Sprint will be “the most dramatic large-scale turnaround” in US history. Son also mentioned that their basic strategy for buying Sprint was to then buy T-Mobile, merge them together to have a company on the same scale as Verizon and AT&T. However, SoftBank was not able to purchase T-Mobile since the regulators fought it every step of the way. Afterwards, Sprint gained a new CEO and entirely new leadership and has been working to stop the bleeding, and have done pretty well. Son said that with Sprint they made “a steady effort. And as a result, the net loss stopped.” He added that they are now seeing a steady increase of subscribers.
Prior to SoftBank purchasing a controlling stake in Sprint, the carrier hadn’t had a positive quarter – as far as adding customers is concerned – in years. The last few quarters the company has been adding customers, and the numbers are only growing. On top of that, under Claure’s leadership the company has worked to cut costs which has helped to stop the bleeding. They are still losing money, but not as much as they were before.
Sprint has slowly started their historic turnaround, now it is up to the carrier to finish that turnaround and become profitable again. As the wireless industry has changed here in the US, so to has Sprint. They have opted to go the route of T-Mobile, under Claure’s leadership. Instead of sticking with the tricks of the past, like Verizon and AT&T are doing to an extent, Sprint has been fighting the price war against T-Mobile and doing fairly well. But the big question here is whether or not they can keep it up in the long run. We’ve already seen T-Mobile doe things to raise prices in the past year or so. And Sprint will likely be doing the same, to increase their revenue.