Sprint still posts big operating losses in 2013, even if its other numbers look good
So now that Sprint has been operating under Softbank’s leadership for a few months, how is the nation’s third largest mobile carrier faring? Well, Sprint has officially announced its Q4 2013 results, and things are not quite as cheery as some investors had hoped.
In spite of progress on Network Vision, the launch of Spark, and a more widespread deployment of HD voice, Sprint had another losing quarter. It lost a total of $576 million in the last quarter of 2013 – that’s more than half a billion – even if that was improved by 22% year-over-year. Revenues were a bit healthier at $7.2 billion, as Sprint added 58,000 postpaid customers and average revenue per user (ARPU) was at its highest ever – $64.07.
The rest of Sprint’s 682,000 net adds were in the prepaid sector, and for all of 2013, Sprint suffered an operating loss of $1.9 billion (its revenues sat at $28.6 billion). And despite T-Mobile’s best efforts to steal customers from its three larger competitors, Sprint ended the year with a record total 53.9 million customers (over 30 million of those are postpaid).
Despite some of Sprint’s successes, its sustained operating losses are still somewhat concerning, especially as Softbank makes the argument that – in order to remain competitive – it must purchase T-Mobile. We’ll see what happens, but what do you make of Sprint’s end-of-year results?
[Sprint]
