Sprint Puts Positive Spin on Losses

Sprint Puts Positive Spin on Losses

By LAURA M. HOLSON

Published: August 6, 2008

Sprint Nextel, the troubled No. 3 wireless carrier, lost nearly a million customers in the second quarter. But the company says it lost some of them on purpose.

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Competition for Customers

Meanwhile its chief rivals, AT&T andVerizon Wireless, respectively gained 1.3 million and 1.5 million new wireless customers. As customers tighten their spending during rough economic times and when nearly nine out of every 10 Americans already own a cellphone, winning customers from a competitor is the only way to grow quickly. And at that task, analysts say,Sprint is struggling.

Daniel R. Hesse, who has been chief executive of the company since January, said that Sprint had deliberately rid itself of some of those 901,000 customers. Mr. Hesse said Sprint tightened credit standards in order to focus on keeping dependable mobile phone customers who have the money to pay their monthly bills. “We did it knowingly,” he said. “We are interested in quality, not quantity.” Sprint said Wednesday that it now has 51.9 million customers...

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Some apps are safe because they are simply iPhone versions of their normal web service. Google and Yelp are two examples out of hundreds of applications that are simply marking their territory for now...

T-Mobile USA Growth Helps Deutsche Telekom (DT) Beat Expectations

T-Mobile USA's growth again beat T-Mobile's growth in Europe and helped parent company Deutsche Telekom (DT) beat analysts' expectations.

T-Mobile added 668,000 net subscribers during Q2, down from 857,000 during Q2 2007 and 981,000 during Q1. That represents 12.3% year-over-year subscriber growth, better than the 7.5% growth T-Mobile saw in Europe. And it's still much better than larger U.S. rival Sprint Nextel, which lost 900,000 subscribers during Q2...