Sprint falls to 4th place: Why Sprint execs are still smiling
Sprint posted quarterly earnings Tuesday, showing that it is exceeding analyst expectations and rebuilding its customer base. Is that enough?
A woman talks on her phone as she walks past T-Mobile and Sprint wireless stores in New York, July 30, 2009.
Brendan McDermid/Reuters/File
聽Well, it鈥檚 official: Sprint鈥檚 third-place title has left the building.
The company added 675,000 new customers in the last quarter, compared to T-Mobile鈥檚 more than 2 million, reported .聽T-Mobile's total subscriber count reached 58.9 million, beating Sprint鈥檚
The shift in market share had been widely expected. After T-Mobile posted its quarterly earnings last week, analysts predicted that it would finally surpass Sprint to become the , reported USA Today.
T-Mobile鈥檚 figures had exceeded Wall Street expectations, posting $8.2 billion in sales compared to the $7.96 billion average estimate, reported
This new ranking "almost has a that trumps the practical significance," John Jackson, a mobile analyst with research firm IDC, told USA Today.
But not all is lost for Sprint. As the Kansas-based carrier filed its own Tuesday, the company 聽analysts鈥� estimates, Bloomberg reports.
Firstly, its return to customer growth marks a significant improvement after seven straight years of customer losses, noted Bloomberg.
reports that instead of losing 150,000 customers last quarter, as one Macquarie Securities analyst had projected, Sprint lost 12,000.
It also showed signs of increasing customer loyalty, as its traditional postpaid subscriber base 鈥� a lucrative sector of users who pay the bill at the end of the month rather than in advance 鈥� experienced a than before, the company reported.
As a signal of rising confidence, Sprint raised its outlook for the fiscal year. It now 聽its earnings before income and taxes to land between $7.2 billion and $7.6 billion, compared to an earlier forecast of $6.5 billion to $6.9 billion.
This was largely based on the company鈥檚 earnings last quarter, which at $2.08 billion surpassed predictions of $1.8 billion, according to . Sales, however, fell 3 percent to $8.03 billion, as opposed to forecasts of $8.33 billion.
Tablet sales and call quality improvements are聽contributing to Sprint鈥檚 new stream of subscribers, which a spokesman told CNET has .
But Bloomberg reports the latest numbers also for CEO Marcelo Claure, who joined Sprint last August and has gotten more attention for 聽with T-Mobile head John Legere than leadership.
On Monday, Mr. Claure announced a reshuffle in senior management, taking on new hires Tarek Robbiati and G眉nther Ottendorfer as chief financial officer and chief operating officer, as well as promoting John Saw, chief network officer, to head up its tech division.
"It's exciting to see the company competing again as a result of our turnaround plan," Claure in a conference call with analysts on Tuesday.