Sprint posts $344 million in losses while slowing customer defections

Sprint (NYSE: S)’s road to recovery will be a long and drawn out process, mostly dependent on CEO Dan Hesse’s ability to get the wireless carrier’s high-speed, WIMAX-based XOHM data network up and running in a timely manner. Sprint desperately needs to redefine itself as something more than just the No. 3 wireless voice carrier, and an advanced data service is just what the doctor ordered.

Unfortunately, the road to recovery has to start at the bottom – customer service. Sprint has announced that they’ll be concentrating on improving customer service in a bid to stem massive customer hemorrhaging. On that front, Sprint has done well for itself. Sprint lost a total of 901,000 customers in Q1 2008, which is an improvement from the 1.09 million customer that defected in the same period a year ago.

But, the improved customer retention numbers came at the cost of profits. Sprint posted a modest $19 million in profits for Q1 of 2007. For Q1 2008, things are looking decidedly worse. Sprint posted Q1 revenues of $9.05 billion (which missed analysts’ projection of $9.17 billion), but couldn’t manage to stay out of the red – $344 million in red ink translates in to loss of 12 cents a share.

“Our company-wide retention efforts, which include Simply Everything plans, our Now Network campaign and the launch of the [Samsung] Instinct handset are proving to be effective retention tools, particularly for high-value customers, and this is beginning to have positive impacts on churn and ARPU,” according to Sprint CEO Dan Hesse.

Sprint clearly has along way to go before they can consider their comeback from decline anything close to a success, but with vigilance, focus on customer service, and wireless broadband data services, we can see Sprint emerging from the depths reborn as the premier data provider in the US. What’s $344 million in losses anyway?

[Via: MocoNews]