Sprint Nextel Posts a Loss on subscribers and profits

Sprint Nextel released their quarterly numbers yesterday, posting losses, customer retention, share value, and average income-per-subscriber information. Sprint lost 220,000 customers a month during the first 3 months of the year, resulting in an average churn of over 2.3%. The overall effect was a loss of $211 million dollars during the first quarter, While the company pointed to a total increase in customers of 568,000 in the period, most of those were less-valuable prepaid customers, who tend to move among the carriers and spend less each month. Sprint claimed 53.6 million customers to Verizon's 60.7 million and AT&T's 62.2 million. They said that the revenue and subscriber loss was due to the fact that it had poured resources into network upgrades and the latest handsets. (I'm not sure if we can buy that one!..) On a positive note, the company posted a significant amount of revenue from data plans and add-ons, indicating an increase of 44 percent from the year before. full story