Sprint's second quarter results showed some momentum as the company added post-paid subscriptions and improved its average revenue per user. But the company's bottom line still needs to improve if it wants to compete with the bigger dogs on the wireless block.
The wireless carrier, which closed a deal with Softbank, integrated Clearwire and bolstered spectrum in a transaction with U.S. Cellular, featured a muddled financial picture.
For the second quarter, Sprint reported a net loss of $1.6 billion, or 53 cents a share, on revenue of $8.8 billion. Thomson Reuters puts Sprint's non-GAAP second quarter loss at 31 cents a share, but there are many adjusted figures in the statement. Wall Street was expecting Sprint to report a second quarter non-GAAP loss of 30 cents a share on revenue of $8.88 billion.
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In the jumbled financial results, the following positive trends stick out:
Here's the problem. Sprint's results have so many adjustments and moving parts that it's tough to get a good read on them relative to AT&T and Verizon. Within two paragraphs of both reports from Sprint's largest rivals, you know the bottom and top line pictures.
In other words, Sprint is a work in progress as the following subscriber moving parts show. Sprint lost prepaid customers, added postpaid, dropped a bunch of Nextel customers and ended up with total wireless net subscriber losses of more than 2 million.
On a conference call, CEO Dan Hesse noted Sprint has made a lot of progress on many fronts, but there's still work to do and the company faces a resurgent T-Mobile from below and the giants above. Hesse said:
We believe with the combination of our existing network modernization efforts the addition of the complimentary Clearwire spectrum and scale from the Softbank transaction we can over time build a powerful network and a much stronger competitor.