S Q4 Losses Narrow; Still Higher Than Expectations
Sprint Nextel Corp (NYSE: S) announced that its fourth-quarter losses narrowed to $980 million, or $0.34 a share, from a loss of $1.6 billion, or $0.57 a share, in the year-ago period. S’s revenues for the quarter dropped 7% to $7.87 billion. Analysts expected a loss of $0.18 a share on revenues of $8 billion.
The Overland Park, Kansas, telecommunications giant posted 24% growth in its free cash flows to $666 million, up from $536 million a year ago. S lost 69,000 net retail subscribers in the quarter. The company's year-over-year post-paid gross addition improvement was the best in the history of Sprint Nextel. Net post-paid subscriber losses improved by more than 40% in the second half of 2009, as compared to the second half of 2008 and the first half of 2009. For the fourth quarter, the sequential improvement in the net post-paid subscriber was by almost 300,000 and by more than 600,000 year-over-year. Churn, the rate of contracted customers leaving the company, came down to 2.11%, from 2.16% a year earlier and 2.17% in the previous quarter.
However, S’s wireless revenues declined 5.2%, and average monthly revenue per user, a key metric for wireless companies, in the post-paid segment was about $56, up from about $55 a year and a quarter earlier. For the full year, Sprint Nextel lost $2.4 billion, or $0.84 per share, on $32.3 billion in revenues, compared to $2.8 billion, or $0.98 per share, in losses it bore in 2008 on revenues of $35.6 billion.
The third-largest carrier in the country said that its post-paid and total subscriber losses will improve further in 2010. The company expects its capital expenditures in 2010 to come in at $2 billion.
