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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.
Very funny on the last part about it getting released on July 22. The guys at sprint have really upset its customers with the stumbling of the issue on releasing this phone and we have to admit that every other carrier is releasing some really interesting phones. I have been waiting on this phone since last year. I think this is the reason why sprint is loosing so much revenue. I would also like to add that they better hope that that I-Phone look a like can compare to the I-phone as well (small screen). I have been really tempted to switch to AT&T but the one thing that keeps me with Sprint is Microsoft Outlook and windows live. Safari is hard to work with when it comes to clicking (tapping) on certain links on the I-Phone (my wife has one). I do love the huge screen but I have to hold out on the 800w if it shows its ugly face in July. If it doesn't show up for sale, I will be sadly leaving the Sprint network in search of the latest greatest smartphone if they can't come up with one. I have been with Sprint for 8 years but there has to be some major changes with the phones coming out this year and next year because AT&T and T-Mobile are coming up with different gadgets Quarterly. Come on Sprint! Get your hands out of your pockets and get to work! Oh yeah; get rid of Next-tel! You have not a nice smartphone in their line up. Sale it to a walkie-talkie company and cut your loses.