Sprint's Quarterly Results: As Bad as We Figured
After rumors of spinning off Nextel, rumors of getting bought out by Deutsche Telekom, and making some sort of weird combination of declaring uncle and making a Hail Mary pass by creating a new, separate WiMAX company... after all that we weren't exactly expecting Sprint to report anything very good about the past three months. We don't want to say it was worse than we expected, because it wasn't. Of course, we were expecting that the entire company would explode like a Death Star with a proton torpedo in its reactor vent shaft, so it would have been pretty tough for them stoop that low.
Their press release has the lowlights:
- Loss of $253 million on $8 billion in revenue. Revenue was down 9% over last year and last year they made $253 million in profits. So that's bad.
- Loss of 1.09 million subscribers, the vast majority of whom where standard, “post-paid” subscribers.
- Their Average Revenue Per User (aka ARPU, who is the angry, vengeful god of wireless carriers) was down 6% over last year as well.
“As expected, our Wireless business delivered weak financial results. While the business will continue to face challenges in the short term, we are making progress in methodically attacking the sources of our performance issues. In the first quarter, we implemented a new, more focused brand campaign, we executed on our plans to take costs out of the business, and we made progress on the larger organizational and strategic decisions that we believe will lead to improved profitability in the long term,” said Dan Hesse, Sprint Nextel CEO
That Treo 800w better get released on July 22nd as expected, both Sprint and Palm are gonna need it.
