Sprint Narrows Losses; Kindle and Prepaid Help

Sprint Nextel's 182,000 total net subscribers represents a sequential improvement of over one million subscribers and the best sequential net change in total subscribers in Sprint Nextel history, says Hesse.

Sprint Nextel appears to be having success adding prepaid customers, a trend noticeable at some other wireless firms, as well as with its wholesale business, driven in part by Amazon Kindle subscriptions.

Sprint Nextel had 49.1 million customers at the end of the quarter, compared to 49.3 million at the end of 2008. This includes 35.4 million post-paid subscribers (25.3 million on CDMA, 8.9 million on iDEN, and 1.2 million Power Source users who utilize both networks), 4.3 million prepaid subscribers (3.5 million on iDEN and 800,000 on CDMA) and 9.4 million wholesale and affiliate subscribers.

In the first quarter, total wireless customers declined by approximately 182,000, including net losses of 1.25 million post-paid customers – comprising 531,000 CDMA and 719,000 iDEN customers (including a net 94,000 customers who transferred from the iDEN network to the CDMA network).

The company also lost 90,000 prepaid CDMA customers. The company gained a net 764,000 prepaid iDEN customers and 394,000 wholesale and affiliate subscribers. The company achieved total subscriber growth on the iDEN network.

Wireless service revenues for the quarter of $6.4 billion declined 10 percent  year-over-year and two percent quarter over quarter.

Wireless post-paid ARPU in the quarter was stable sequentially and year-over-year at $56, primarily due to growth in fixed-rate bundled plans such as "Simply Everything," offset by seasonal declines in usage.

Data revenues contributed greater than $15 to overall post-paid ARPU in the first quarter, led by growth in CDMA data ARPU. CDMA data ARPU inow represents more than 31 percent of total CDMA ARPU.

Prepaid ARPU in the quarter was approximately $31 compared to $29 in the year-ago period and $30 in the fourth quarter of 2008. The year-over-year and sequential increases reflect a growing contribution from prepaid subscribers on unlimited plans.