With two bids now for the company, Sprint’s Q1 numbers have less urgency than normal. With their LTE buildout underway and the Nextel shutdown this coming quarter as well as the whole Softbank/Dish/Clearwire brain teaser in the background, beating overall expectations demonstrates some real focus. Sprint posted revenues of $8.79B and a loss per share of $0.21, both of which were better than expected.
On the wireless front, sales included 5 million smartphones, 30% of which were iPhones. The total number of subscribers fell to 55.2M, but they managed to hold onto more of the Nextel refugees than anticipated. Just one more quarter of Nextel bleed-off, although there are still 1.3M subscribers there doing heaven-knows-what. On the LTE buildout front, the company now has 13,500 sites live.
As usual, the company’s wireline business didn’t fare so well, and this quarter it took a particularly big blow amidships. Revenue fell to $893M, while adjusted OIBDA dipped all the way to $128M, for an all time low OIBDA margin of 14.3%. However, last quarter’s wireline results were unexpectedly high, so if one takes the two as outliers to the overall downward trend not much has changed. Both Voice and Internet revenues were down big sequentially, while Data revenues were a bit steadier.
Overall, a solid quarter for Sprint in the shadow of the Softbank and Dish offers. Earlier in the week the Sprint board created a special committee to evaluate the Dish offer, but it will be a while yet before they formally respond I’m sure.
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Categories: Financials · Internet Backbones · Wireless
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When you can have a loss of $643M in a single quarter and beat expectations, I think it is time to sell.
Where are the incumbents on pricing these days? Would dropping price to increase demand cannibalize too much existing revenue?