Sprint announced their earnings for their fourth fiscal quarter of 2016, and the entire fiscal year. Sprint’s fiscal year runs from April 1st through March 31st. For the fourth fiscal quarter of the year, Sprint posted 187,000 net adds. Interestingly enough, they added 180,000 in the prepaid space, but lost 118,000 in the postpaid space. With wholesale bringing in 125,000 net adds. So while prepaid brought in some big numbers, they did lose a big number of lines in the postpaid space. That’s the opposite of the last two quarters, where Sprint has typically lost close to half a million prepaid customers, and postpaid and wholesale sales picked up the slack. As of the end of March 2017, Sprint has 31,576 postpaid connections, 11,992 prepaid connections and 16,134 wholesale connections, which equals around 59,702 connections total.
Churn rate for postpaid at Sprint has jumped up a bit. Going to 1.75 last quarter, compared to 1.67 the quarter prior. A year ago, churn was 1.72. On the prepaid side, churn has kept about the same, with a high number of 4.99. For the fiscal year, Sprint added 930,000 connections, which more than doubled what they added in fiscal year 2015. Operating revenues for fiscal year 2016 equaled $33.3 billion, and it grew for the first time in three years. For the fourth quarter, net operating revenues were $8.5 billion, which is a 6% increase over the same period last year. There was a net loss of $1.2 billion for the year, with operating income totaling $1.8 billion and Adjusted EBITDA coming in at $10 billion. Sprint says that this was the highest operating income in ten years and highest Adjusted EBITDA in nine years. The cost of service and selling, general and administrative expenses decreased by $2.1 billion year-over-year. Finally, net cash from operating activities were $4.2 billion and adjusted free cash flow was $607 million for the year.
In Sprint’s earnings report, they show that nearly 18% of their customers are still on subsidized smartphones and other products. While 42% are leasing from Sprint and 40% are on leasing plans. ARPU for Sprint’s postpaid and prepaid platforms were $47.34 and $30.08 respectively. Postpaid is down from $49.70, while prepaid is up from $27.61, interestingly enough, especially since postpaid is typically more expensive than prepaid. It appears that Sprint had a decent quarter. They were able to stop some of the bleeding, and their year-end numbers show that they were able to really cut back on a number of costs to save some extra cash.