Sprint has reported the company’s best-ever quarterly profit as part of its fourth quarter results for the 2017 fiscal year, noting that it had an annual operating income of $2.7 Billion and a net income of $7.4 Billion, which is also Sprint’s first time reporting a net income in eleven years. Adding to these monumental achievements by the U.S.’ fourth-largest wireless carrier, Sprint’s Q4 2017 fiscal year report also shows that the carrier was busy bringing in new customers. Though not necessarily the most of the four major wireless carriers in the country, Sprint reported a fair amount of new postpaid net additions, recording a total of 606,000 and marking the carrier’s third consecutive year of adding a significant amount of new postpaid customers to its service.
What’s more is that this is Sprint’s highest number of postpaid phone gross additions in six years. 55,000 of the 606,000 postpaid net additions that Sprint added for the 2017 fiscal year were from the fourth quarter. Sprint also notes that it added 44,000 net migrations from prepaid to non-Sprint postpaid services. Sprint’s prepaid services received a hefty uptick as well. Compared to last year when Sprint recorded 1 Million net losses in its prepaid division, this year Sprint has reported prepaid net additions of 363,000 (170,000 of which were from the fourth quarter) which it attributes to its MVNO service Boost Mobile, and bolstered by a three-year record-low churn in prepaid customers, reporting a churn of 4.58-percent.
Other highlights from Sprint’s report include a fiscal year 2017 net income of $7.4 Billion and an adjusted EBITDA of $11.1 Billion, as well as net cash provided operating activities of $10.1 Billion and adjusted free cash flow of $945 Million, which makes this Sprint’s second year in a row of having a free cash flow that was positive. Sprint’s results display that the carrier is doing well and perhaps better than some might have expected. Whether or not Sprint’s positive report has any affect on the merger with T-Mobile is unclear, though it’s possible that it may not make things easy if part of the argument is that the two should merge to better equip them to take on the competition.