Sprint continues to lose subscribers — just not as fast as before, and that alone raised the animal spirits in investors Wednesday. The company reported lost 245,000 net postpaid (contract) subscribers in the quarter, down from 333,000 in the first quarter and 1.5 million in the second quarter of 2013. The company continues to blame its network upgrade, which causes outages and dropped calls for the stampede of customers for the exits.
Sprint finished the quarter with 54.55 million subscribers, compared with 54.89 million in the first quarter. Monthly average revenue per user (ARPU) dropped sequentially for postpaid customers from $62.98 to $61.65, while prepaid monthly ARPU rose from $27.07 to $27.97.
As in the first quarter, tablet connections propped up subscription numbers. Sprint added 535,000 tablet customers. The bad news is that tablet customers generate a substantially lower ARPU than phone subscribers.
Meanwhile, the slow-motion courtship of T-Mobile USA Inc. (NYSE: TMUS) by Sprint and its parent SoftBank now has just one last issue: when are the happy couple going to set the date? Most of the other details have been leaked: a total price of $32 billion for T-Mobile (about $40 a share), a $2 billion breakup fee, $45 billion in financing and the promotion of T-Mobile’s CEO John Legere to the top job at the merged company. But when? We can be pretty sure that it is not today.
Sprint’s stock was up about 3.4% in premarket trading Tuesday, at $8.27 in a 52-week range of $5.92 to $11.47.
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