Sprint today released its earnings report for the first fiscal quarter of 2014, detailing a net income of $23 million, the best result in over seven years. The US mobile operator also confirmed that 3G network maintenance was largely complete, while LTE coverage expands to cover approximately 254 million people. Sprint had previously been struggling with new affordable plans to attract custom and forking out for upgrading 4G infrastructure.
It’s safe to say Sprint is starting to turn things around. The company’s EBITDA (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization) of $1.83 billion grew by 30 percent year-on-year and the adjusted margin of almost 24 percent was the best recorded in six years. The main issue Sprint was experiencing was losing customers, which totalled 383,000 last quarter. This has been reduced to 220,000 and while it’s still a sizeable figure, the amount of customers switching is at least dropping.
However, bearing the above in mind, Sprint also reports the network was able to increase postpaid gross additions by 16 percent compared to the same quarter in 2013 and retail smartphone sales almost hit 5 million. The network also added a total of 503,000 wholesale and affiliate customers during this quarter, serving over 53 million subscribers at the end of fiscal Q1 2014. As well as finances, Sprint also touches on the collection of awards obtained in the report.
Forecasting the future, the company expects calendar 2014 adjusted EBITDA to be between $6.7 and $6.9 billion. The quarterly earnings conference call will be held at 8:30am (ET) today.
