Leap Wireless up, but still down in Q4

Usually we have to wait a month or so for companies to announce their fourth quarter results. Because they also comprise the year-end results, the compilation takes a bit longer, and companies usually end up announcing both quarterly and yearly results sometime in February. We got a quick preview of Leap Wireless’s fourth quarter, however, when CEO Doug Hutcheson spoke at a Citigroup investor conference. The results look encouraging, though they did not add as many subscribers as they did in Q4 2008.

Up against expectations ranging from 329,000 to 350,000 net adds, Leap underperformed, adding 300,000 new subscribers in the fourth quarter. That’s more than double their 116,000 Q3 adds, but a nearly 20 percent dip from the 385,000 subscribers it added in Q4 2008. Still, avoiding churn was and remains to be a key for Leap, and according to Hutcheson they did a good job of bandaging that number in Q4 after seeing an enormous 5.4 percent churn rate in Q3.

We’ll see now how Leap reacts in 2010. They’re up against some tough competition, with Boost Mobile offering its unlimited plan on Sprint’s CDMA network and MetroPCS switching to a flat-rate billing format. How will leap respond? That’s what we’re looking forward to in 2010.

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