This week's earnings report for Sprint was a heavily anticipated one, given it should provide whether or not new owner SoftBank and CEO Marcelo Claure are turning things around for the struggling operator. The results are rather mixed. According to Sprint's report, the company continues to lose core postpaid customers, but the rate of decline is slower than this time last year.
Sprint added 1.2 million total users, compared to 967,000 customers gained a quarter earlier, and a net losses of 383,000 customers during the same quarter last year.
In a small victory for the company, Sprint actually managed to retain its third-place position in terms of the total number of subscribers, despite all of the noise T-Mobile is making with its consumer-friendly branding. With T-Mobile leading all carriers in terms of subscriber additions and the difference now of only around 305,000 users, that victory may not last long.
Meanwhile, Sprint's network continues to lag in latency and speed performance when compared to the other three carriers, but the company continues to insist it's working on a new round of "Next Generation Network" upgrades I'll have a follow up post on. A big criticism of Sprint is that the network everybody wants seems perpetually around the next corner.
All told, Sprint reported a loss of $224 million during the first quarter, up from a loss of $151 million the same quarter one year earlier. Sprint also saw overall revenue drop from $9 billion to $8.28 billion, thanks in large part to heavy marketing and promotions.
Still, the company's CEO was quick to highlight the fact that Sprint has seen subscriber growth two concurrent quarters with the company's total net addition of 170,000 new monthly subscribers. "We continue to focus on both quantity and quality," Claure told attendees of the company's earnings call.