Sprint’s not finished yet, preliminary quarterly earnings show

Sprint took Thursday to report preliminary results for its third fiscal quarter, and showed T-Mobile still has its work cut out for it. During the quarter, Sprint’s net customer additions totaled 967,000, including postpaid net additions of 30,000, prepaid net additions of 410,000, and wholesale net additions of 527,000.

T-Mobile has practically been going for Sprint’s neck over the last year. T-Mobile’s CEO John Legere wants to be the third-largest carrier, bad.

In the postpaid sector, Sprint had its highest number of postpaid gross additions in three years, and postpaid phone gross additions increased 20 percent for the quarter year-over-year. It’s finally adding customers again.

In a press release on Thursday, Sprint pointed to its new CEO Marcelo Claure for adding new programs like the “Cut Your Bill in Half” event. Sprint claims it will cut in half the monthly rate plan for Verizon and AT&T customers who switch to Sprint.

“Sprint’s first priority is a return to customer growth and our results during the last quarter show we are on the right track,” Claure said. “While we still have work to do, it is clear that our aggressive actions to provide customers with the best value in wireless are gaining momentum.”

Screen Shot 2015-01-08 at 9.23.48 PM

The growth for the holiday quarter should put Sprint at 56 million total connections, 1 million more than T-Mobile. T-Mobile’s Legere has made it his personal mission to pass Sprint to become the third-largest carrier in 2015.

Sprint’s stock was down a percentage and a half in regular trading on Thursday. Sprint’s stock has lost almost half its value in the last year.

For the same quarter, T-Mobile posted 1.0 million branded postpaid phone net customer additions – compared to Sprint’s 967,000.

It seems like the T-Mobile-Sprint war is going to become a theme here at iDownloadBlog this year. I’ll be honest, this entertains me a lot.

[Press Release, Graph via GigaOm]