Sprint Shrs Rally Ahead Of Earnings Tomorrow A.M.
Sprint Nextel (S) shares are rallying today ahead of the company Q2 earnings report due before the start of trading tomorrow morning. The Street consensus is for revenue of $9.17 billion and profits of 3 cents a share.
In a preview note this morning, Bank of America’s David Barden says that Sprint’s big focus in the quarter was reducing customer churn. “How churn’s improvement impacted net subscribers will be a key focus for the market,” he writes.
Morgan Stanley’s Simon Flannery said in his own preview note earlier this week that the “wildcard” for the wireless industry this quarter is the magnitude of Sprint’s subscriber losses. He notes that both AT&T (T) and Verizon (VZ) posted “strong subscriber counts,” which he says either means Q2 was simply a healthy quarter or that Sprint and T-Mobile “may be experiencing more pressure than anticipated.”
Other things to listen for:
- Any info on the impact of the Apple (AAPL) iPhone 3G launch.
- Any update on Clearwire, (CLWR), which is now Sprint’s partner on WiMax.
- An update on the company’s strategic review.
- Cap ex guidance.
Sprint today is up 36 cents, or 4.2%, to $8.47.
one thing is that churning is not a concern. what sprint needs to do is lower deposites. Improve on customer service. Alot of people like sprint, but dont get the answers they seek and then go to a different carrier & provide some leanacy for DECEASED or for people going overseas. other then those things, its ok. how do you keep charging a dead person just wrong and this should be a class action lawsuit alone. SPRINT WHAT ARE YOU THINKING!!!!!!!!!!
YOULL START WORKING ON YOUR CANCELATION PROBLEMS NEXT YEAR.
With the overseas call centers the quality care that customers and potential customers receive suffers. Penny wise and subscriber-loss foolish. Also it takes 5 sprint employees to do the job in three times the time that Nextel employees used to get results in. Strive for mediocrity.
Re: comment by Austin Rodriguez- Do you wonder how many of those 53 million subscribers are dead? And - How many of them died while on hold or while being transferred endlessly when they called Sprint Customer Service?
Sprint has made major improvements on the customer service side but still there is more progress to be made. Applause!!!
How is Sprint’s wireless technogy?
Sprint offers the latest technology available in the USA. They will lead the path in growth very soon. Customer service has improved greatly as well as customer satisfaction. WiMax will be the best thing since sliced bread.
If you look a little into what Sprint put out today, you will see that it actually added fewer GROSS subcribers that last quarter. Even though Sprint’s GROSS subscriber losses were about 100,000 better than last quarter, it also added about 800,000 fewer GROSS subscribers. This is not good. So even though Sprint is reporting it improved churn by almost 20% compared to last quarter, meaning it retained about 700,000 more existing customers compared to last quarter, it still lost almost as many total customers.
WiMax is a pipe dream Sprint keeps living for…instead of saving their current customer base. Now that the other carriers have PTT it just means the rest of the old Nextel customers (some of their highest ARPU customer mind you) will be leaving as well. They also just lost 800K+ customers from Qwest when they moved over to VZW.
Tech Trader Daily is a blog on technology investing written from Palo Alto, California by long-time Barron's West Coast Editor Eric J. Savitz. The blog provides news, analysis and original reporting on events important to investors in software, hardware, the Internet, telecommunications and related fields.
