Sprint Closes the Books on the Pre-Softbank Era

July 30th, 2013 by · Leave a Comment

With its second quarter results today, Sprint Nextel (NYSE:S, news, filings) closes the book on its former self in several ways. Along with the end of the quarter came the shutdown of the Nextel network, soon followed by the closing of the Clearwire and Softbank transactions. Thus their actual numbers have a bit less relevance than usual.

However, for the second quarter total revenues rose sequentially to $8.88B, beating expectations of about $8.69B. Adjusted OIBDA, on the other hand, fell sequentially to $1.4B. In wireless they added some 1.2M iPhone customers, but of course lost some 2M Nextel customers as the old network finally got shut down.  For their LTE rollout, they now have 20,000 sites online reaching 151 cities and nationwide.  They expect their LTE network to be reaching 200M in population by the end of the year.

As for wireline, it didn’t even get a mention in the text of the earnings PR until the tables at the end, reflecting Sprint’s priorities in pushing its wireless business. However, the wireline business did see a slight improvement over the prior quarter, at least temporarily arresting its long term slide. Revenues rose sequentially to $910M on the strength of higher voice revenues, while adjusted OIBDA was also up a bit to $129M.

But now the focus turns to what Softbank will do with the balance of the year as it takes charge.  How will Sprint’s plans evolve from here to best take advantage of the new faces on the board, the new capital structure, and all that spectrum?  Whatever they do, however, will almost certainly not take place as fast as folks think it ought to – that’s the nature of today’s media environment.

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Categories: Financials · Wireless

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