2/22/2009  by www.mountainviewcellphones.com

Another disappointing quarter on subscriber loses.  The good thing was, it was not as bad as expected.

The company has announced ways to save cash and the free cash flow of the corporation should allow it to meet any future obligations.  So, it’s not going broke.  It has also written down everything from the Nextel acquisition, so it has a clean accounting operating slate for improved ROE in the future.

The stock was improved as the market correctly perceives the company doing the right things to shore up it’s financial condition in an environment where debt capital is harder to come by at a reasonable price.

The launch of the first dual mode 4G data card is a great plus.  Now, we need a network to roll out to use it and to take advantage of this newer technology.  Sprint has an MVNO agreement to resell Clearwire under the Sprint name when the time comes.  Clearwire is working very hard on the roll-out.  Many people at Intel, Google, and others are awaiting impatiently.

Sprint still needs to bring it’s churn down to sub 1.9%.  This will boost earnings and growth tremendously.  It’s doing better than last year, but not good enough.  The customer service stats and processes and systems need to improve much more.  Hesse can point to this one metric for a clear win but there is still room for improvement.

The biggest product introductions of the PRE and WiMax this year will be also telling of growing the subscriber base my millions.  If successful in these two endeavors, Sprint will be taking share from ATT, T-mobile, and Verizon…something it hasn’t done in years.  These are the iconic launches, Sprint still needs to execute and keep it’s product line fresh and defined.

Sprint has purposely kept a smaller product line up than the competitors to drive profitability and more value price points for consumers in segments it targets.  Sprint definitely needs to get faster product releases of Blackberry devices.

Now that Verizon and Alltel are together, Blackberry devices may actually release first on CDMA as it’s now a larger market…and this will help Sprint overall.

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