It appears that it might be time to call upon the spirit of motivational speaker Matt Foley to help Sprint figure out how to get “back…on…the right…track.”
Sprint announced an almost $30 billion quarterly loss today. That’s such a big loss that Sprint also announced that it will stop paying dividends to shareholders for the “foreseeable future,” according to a Reuters report. Not good.
Here’s more from Reuters…
Sprint, which has been losing ground to rivals amid network and customer service problems, forecast that it would lose 1.2 million customers who pay monthly bills in the first quarter, compared with 683,000 such losses in the fourth quarter.
While Sprint had warned last month of continued downward pressure, Stanford Group analyst Michael Nelson said the subscriber outlook was “considerably worse than even most of the bearish estimates out there.”
Nelson, who had estimated that Sprint would lose 400,000 valuable post-paid subscribers who pay monthly bills in the first quarter, said investors were also disappointed that the company did not lay out a plan to turn around the business.
“People expected that things were going to be really bad but were hoping they were going to have a game plan of how they’re going to fix it,” he said.
Instead, Sprint said it was assessing a reorganization of its business model, and associated sales, distribution and marketing plans. It also said it borrowed $2.5 billion from a revolving credit facility.
The newly-announced $99 unlimited plan is a step in the right direction, but it’s still just Sprint playing catch-up to the other wireless carriers’ $99 unlimited plans. Although Sprint’s truly is everything — voice, data, premium services — so we’ll see how well that catches on and if it’ll help to turn things around.
Sprint posts huge loss, scraps dividends [Yahoo! News]