Sprint continues to struggle to keep high-value subscribers from flocking to its competitors. The carrier, which reported its first-quarter earnings this morning, added 568,000 subscribers overall in the quarter, but posted a net loss of 220,000 post-paid customers. The new subscribers came mostly through wholesale sales and prepaid channels. Overall, Sprint finished the quarter with 53.6 million subscribers.
Revenues: Sprint's total revenue was $10.1 billion in the first quarter, with wireless accounting for $8.7 billion of that total. The carrier reported a net loss of $211 million, or seven cents per share, after a profit of $419 million in the same period last year.
ARPU: Postpaid average revenue per user was $59, a decline of slightly less than 5 percent from first quarter 2006. The company's overall data ARPU was $9.25 for the quarter but its CDMA data ARPU was $12.25, which is 20 percent of the total ARPU.
Boost Mobile: Sprint's CEO Gary Forsee touted the Boost Mobile prepaid business, which continues to generate strong growth. Boost added 275,000 net adds for the quarter bringing its total subscriber base to 4.3 million.
iDEN: Sprint continues to struggle with its iDEN subscriber base. At the end of first quarter it had 16.5 million iDEN subscribers, down from 17.6 million in fourth-quarter 2006. However, Forsee praised the strong uptake in PowerSource dual-CDMA/iDEN handsets. The company sold 400,000 PowerSource handsets in the quarter and expects to have 2 million to 3 million PowerSource handsets on the network by year-end. -Sue
For more on the carrier's quarter:
- see this Sprint release