Mobile carrier Sprint is certainly not going through the best of times, this is for sure, as the company has just taken a massive charge of $1.9 billion in order to write down the value of the Sprint brand. This has happened in a poor fourth quarter performance, where Sprint lost 205,000 postpaid customers during the last three months of 2015, with a churn rate that was higher at 2.3%, while seeing revenue figures drop 1.8%.
Sprint’s CEO, Marcelo Claure, claims that Sprint’s business trajectory is changing, as the company is touted to be adding new customers thanks to its aggressive promotional plans – including the one that would help reduce Verizon and AT&T subscribers’ bills in half should they decide to make the jump over to Sprint. Of course, that sounds good on paper, but taking into consideration how you would need to turn in your handset and obtain a new one, the net savings in the end would be somewhere close to the region of 20% instead.
Apart from that, Sprint also intends to increase the number of retail stores that it has, as it right now remains 600 stores behind T-Mobile, and 3,000 stores short of what Verizon has all over the US. Just how much of an impact additional physical retail presence would make remains to be seen, but hopefully Sprint will be able to maintain a competitive edge.