The earnings parade continues on today with Sprint’s report on its fiscal Q3 2014, which ended on December 31, 2014.
The big yellow carrier says that it added 967,000 total customers in Q3 FY14, up from 590,000 in Q2 FY14 and 682,000 in Q3 FY13. Of that 967,000, Sprint says that it had 30,000 postpaid adds, 410,000 prepaid adds (thanks to Boost Mobile growth), and 527,000 wholesale net adds. At the end of Q3 FY14, Sprint had a total of 55.9 million connections. Sprint’s total retail postpaid churn finished at 2.33 percent, up from 2.22 percent in the previous quarter.
Sprint says that offers like Cut Your Bill In Half and iPhone for Life helped to bring in its highest postpaid gross adds in three years and a postpaid upgrade rate of 11.5 percent. The offers also brought in improvement in the quality of sales, such as the highest percentage of prime credit quality postpaid gross adds and double the amount of new customer accounts with three or more lines than compared to the year-ago quarter.
Financially, Sprint didn’t do quite as hot. Marcelo Claure and Co. brought in $9 billion in net operating revenues, but it posted a net loss of $2.38 billion for the quarter, an increase compared to the net loss of $1.03 billion that it posted in Q3 FY13.
So it looks like Sprint’s Q3 FY14 was good and, well, not so good. The big yellow carrier managed to add nearly 1 million customers thanks to Cut Your Bill In Half and its Boost Mobile subsidiary, but that $2.38 billion loss has to sting just a bit.