By | No Comments
Last updated: Tuesday, May 5, 2009

Sprint Nextel posted a $594 million loss in the first quarter — substantially higher than the $505 million loss the nation’s third-largest wireless carrier recorded in the final three months of 2008. The company also said revenue fell 12 percent to $8.2 billion. Still, Sprint Nextel CEO Dan Hesse told investors that he sees signs of progress in the first-quarter results. “We achieved the largest sequential improvement in overall gross adds and net adds in Sprint Nextel history, reduced churn versus the prior year, and we generated more than enough cash in this quarter alone to pay all of our 2009 debt maturities,” Hesse said. Targeting Customer Satisfaction Hess noted that challenging economic conditions have led to a new market dynamic in which there were as many prepaid as postpaid customer decisions in the U.S. during the quarter. He also thinks it’s entirely possible that the prepaid share of the total market could increase in future quarters. Sprint is benefiting from the trend, Hess said, through its February launch of a flat-rate prepaid plan that offers unlimited nationwide voice, text and multimedia messaging, Web and push-to-talk connectivity for just $50 per month. “We are very encouraged by the success of the Boost Unlimited prepaid offer which we launched on the iDEN network,” said Hesse. “It has been a very long time since we’ve reported the number of iDEN network subscribers actually increasing.” Sprint lost 1.25 million contract or postpaid customers in the first quarter and Hesse said the company needs to do better. However, Sprint’s rate of subscriber defections to other carriers slowed from 1.27 million in the final three months of 2008 to just 182,000 subscribers in the first quarter, driven in major part by consumer uptake to the new Boost Unlimited plan. Aiming For Business Sprint’s investments in customer care since Hesse became chief…

View original here:
Sprint Posts $594 Million Loss But Sees Signs of Progress

CommentSubscribe