Sprint applies pressure, but still bled quite a bit in fourth quarter

Over the past few years, Sprint has definitely given itself a facelift and now has excellent pricing plans and some decent handsets. Sadly, things aren’t turning around as quickly as Sprint would like since it has been showing some tremendous losses the past few quarters. The fourth quarter, however, shows that Sprint is slowly but surely easing its way to where it wants to be.

Sprint lost a net 148,000 subscribers during the fourth quarter 2009; hefty, but a big improvement over its 545,000 losses from the previous quarter. Pre-paid numbers are still up thanks to Boost Mobile and Virgin Mobile where Sprint picked up 435,000 new customers, but post-paid is where it’s at.

While it’s not the biggest chunk of progress, Sprint lost $980 million in the fourth quarter which is slightly better than $1.6 billion YoY. Sprint CEO Dan Hesse is keeping a close eye on costs and keeping things tight while looking ahead to the future. “The fourth quarter completion of the Virgin Mobile USA, Inc. and iPCS, Inc., acquisitions, as well as our additional large investment in Clearwire, are important to our future,” says Hesse.

For a company that actually has great coverage, excellent data speeds, great plans and nice handsets, I’m pulling for Sprint to do well, or at least a lot better, in 2010.

[via eWeek]