Full-year losses of $1.9 billion on $28.6 billion in revenues
A handful of months after it was purchased by SoftBank, Sprint has reported another losing quarter and year on the books. The third-place carrier posted a Q4 2013 loss of $576 million, although that improved 22 percent year-over-year, on revenues of $7.2 billion, also up slightly. Sprint added a total of 682,000 net customers in the quarter, although only 58,000 were postpaid customers. ARPU (Average Revenue Per User) was its highest ever at $64.07.
For the entire year of 2013, Sprint posted operating loss of $1.9 billion on revenues of $28.6 billion, which is up 5 percent year-over-year. It sold a total of 20.5 million smartphones for the year, and a record 95 percent of quarterly postpaid handset sales were smartphones. Sprint ended the year with a total of 53.9 million customers, a record, with over 30 million customers being postpaid.
On the network side, Sprint claims over 200 million people are now covered by its LTE network, and Sprint Spark is now available in 14 “of the largest” U.S. cities. It says that 33,000 towers have been updated with Network Vision improvements, an increase of 24,000 in the last year, and that Spark will make its way to 100 cities in the next three years.
Source: Sprint