Sprint and T-Mobile have been at it for quite some time already, but for now, or at least for the first quarter of 2015, Sprint wins the battle for third place among the biggest wireless carriers in the United States in terms of total number of subscribers.
For two straight quarters, Sprint has been able to manage a steady flow of new sign ups. T-Mobile, perhaps the more visible in terms of its efforts to gain new subscribers, will have to be content with fourth place for now.
For the first quarter of this year, Sprint added 1.2 million new subscribers, which brings it total customer base to 57.1 million. As for T-Mobile, it might have added more subscribers in the last three months (1.8 million), but its total of 56.8 million customers was not enough to surpass Sprint's total.
This should spur T-Mobile even more in its already aggressive efforts. Just recently, T-Mobile announced its latest upcoming promo, Never Settle, which is targeted towards current customers of industry leading Verizon Wireless. The special offer basically involves providing Verizon subscribers a free handset to use for a period of 14 days, with T-Mobile offering to pay the early termination fees for subscribers who decide to switch over to T-Mobile for good.
As for Sprint, the fact that they have now closed two successive quarters with additional subscribers is a sign that things are looking good ever since new CEO Marcelo Claure took over. Claure focused on cost-cutting and streamlining the pricing structure of Sprint's plans, and even opened 1,400 new co-branded Sprint-RadioShack stores, which certainly helped the carrier reach a wider audience.
And it appears that those efforts are paying off. Adding 1.2 million new subscribers during the first three months of the year (actually Sprint's fiscal fourth quarter) is definitely a huge improvement on the loss of 383,000 subscribers the carrier sustained during the same quarter last year. In the previous quarter (last quarter of 2014), Sprint was able to add 967,000 new subscribers.
Of Sprint's 1.2 million new customers, 211,000 were postpaid customers. During the first quarter of 2014, the carrier had lost 231,000 postpaid subscribers, while in the final quarter of last year, Sprint had gained just 30,000 new postpaid customers.
Sprint credits its strong finish in the last quarter to the solid performance of its prepaid divisions. However, the carrier also lost a fewer number of postpaid customers than it has in the previous quarter. Sprint also managed to decrease its customer turnover rate to 1.84 percent, clearly an improvement compared to the 2.3 percent churn rate in the previous quarter.
