Sprint gains customers with Boost, Virgin

It seems like Sprint has lost customers every quarter for the past — long time, let’s say. Yet their prepaid division, Boost Mobile, always seemed to fare well. They added tons of customers in late 2007 and 2008 with its first unlimited plan, UNLTD, even though it was in limited release. Then they hit the jackpot when they launched their $50 unlimited plan last year. Boost added customers throughout 2009 while Sprint postpaid lost. The trend remained the same in the fourth quarter of 2009, though it’s a bit tougher to tell exactly how many customers Boost signed up. All I saw from reports is the number of prepaid subscribers they added, a figure which now includes Virgin Mobile — though since they were officially acquired mid-quarter I’m not sure how the reporting went.

Sprint added 435,000 prepaid subscribers against a loss of 504,000 postpaid. That means their overall loss balanced a bit, at least more than it has in in previous quarters. Given the low number, it probably only includes Boost. Virgin had more than four million subscribers, though I’m not exactly sure how Sprint would go about reporting them.

Further, when asked about the company’s plan for prepaid in 2010, Dan Schulman, former Virgin Mobile CEO and current head of Sprint’s prepaid division, sounded confident. He noted that prepaid is “no longer a one-size-fits-all market,” and that the company would “create brands that have very unique value propositions that appeal to different segments of the market.” That sounds good, inappropriate use of “very” to modify “unique” aside. Could one of these brands possibly, maybe, include Leap or MetroPCS?

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2 Responses

1. ducky Says
   

   “The company gained a net 483,500 prepaid iDEN customers, offset by net losses of 48,500 prepaid CDMA customers.”

   http://investors.sprint.com/phoenix.zhtml?c=127149&p=irol-newsArticle&ID=1385975&highlight=

   
   Posted on February 11th, 2010 at 6:44 pm
2. ducky Says
   

   “Prepaid churn in the fourth quarter of 2009 was 5.56%, compared to 8.20% in the year-ago period and 6.65% in the third quarter of 2009.”

   
   Posted on February 11th, 2010 at 6:51 pm

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