Sprint Nextel Corp.’s (S) fourth-quarter lost more subscribers and sales came in lower than Wall Street analysts expected, although the service provider did manage to narrow its losses.
Sprint, the country’s third-largest wireless carrier, lost 1.3 million customers; 1.1 million of them were coveted post-paid users. So as subscribers defected, revenue fell – by 14 percent, in fact, to $8.43 billion. Analysts polled by Thomson Reuters had projected $8.55 billion in sales.
Meanwhile, Sprint reported an overall net loss of $1.62 billion, or 57 cents a share, compared to net loss of $29.45 billion, or $10.36 a share, a year earlier.
This set of earnings included a $1 billion goodwill write-down; last year’s results included $29.7 billion in writedowns from the Nextel merger.
