Good thing Sprint expects to lose fewer customers this quarter than in previous quarters. Because if the company continues to lose them at its former rate–well, things are going to get even uglier. Reporting a wider third-quarter loss than expected this morning, Sprint said it lost 545,000 wireless customers and 801,000 more in the crucial postpaid category.
Discussing Palm’s first-quarter results earlier this month, the company’s leadership claimed that “the vast majority of new sales” for the quarter were generated by the Pre. Palm sold some 823,000 handsets during that period with sell-through of 810,000 units, so that’s an impressive feat. But only if the sales we’re talking about here were made to on-the-street consumers. And, according to Town Hall research analyst David Eller, it’s not entirely clear that they were.
If there’s a Guinness World Record for shortest-lived promotional offer by a wireless carrier, Sprint’s surely a front-runner for it. Just six or so hours after offering a $100 service credit to new subscribers who purchase a Palm Pre and port their numbers over from another carrier, Sprint canceled it. The company’s official statement after the jump.
Sprint effectively lowered the price of the Palm Pre today to $99 for new customers only, offering a $100 service credit to those who port their numbers over from another carrier. To be eligible for the promotion, customers must purchase the Pre along with a two-year service agreement and abandon their current carriers. UPDATE: Sprint has cancelled the offer. You’ll find further details, here.
Good thing Palm withdrew investor Roger McNamee’s your-next-iPhone-will-be-a-Pre claim because there obviously wasn’t much truth to it. If there was, well, there would have been a massive rush on Pres nationwide this past month. And that clearly didn’t happen.
The Palm Pre has proven a far better curative for the handset maker than for Sprint, its exclusive carrier. Certainly, the Pre doesn’t appear to have done much to reverse Sprint’s decline. Reporting second-quarter earnings this morning, Sprint posted a loss of $384 million, or 13 cents a share as customers defected to rival carriers.
Are sales of the Pre slowing or not? Without official numbers from Palm or Sprint, it’s nearly impossible to tell. But that hasn’t stopped analysts from taking a stab at it. Earlier this week, Pali research claimed Pre sales were tapering off. Now Pacific Crest is saying they remain “robust.”
Sprint has found a novel way to improve its network operations: Turn them over to Ericsson. On Thursday, the wireless carrier announced a long-rumored plan to outsource its network to Ericsson.
It’s been three weeks since the Palm Pre debuted and Sprint is still having trouble keeping it in stock. This according to Sprint Nextel CFO Bob Brust, who says that supplies of the new handset continue to be tight and that Apple’s new iPhone 3GS hasn’t really had an impact on sales.
The Pre, Palm’s new bet-the-company handset, had a successful debut this past weekend. It sold out in hours at most locations on strong early demand, though limited supplies virtually ensured that would be the case. Sprint’s flagship Manhattan store had 200 units at launch. Its store in Boston’s Back Bay area had only 55. Another in San Francisco’s Mission district had 60. And some Best Buy locations reported having just 2 to 4 Pres on hand when their doors opened Saturday morning.
You’re not going to get a critical mass of developers coding for the new platform until you give them devices. There’s only so many things you can control in the initial delivery.
– Kevin Packingham, senior vice president for product and technology development at Sprint, explains the paucity of apps the Palm Pre will launch with tomorrow
One of the simplest ways to create a shortage, and the buying frenzy that typically accompanies it, is to announce that there will be one. And this is precisely what Sprint CEO Dan Hesse did for the Palm Pre Tuesday. Speaking at J.P. Morgan’s Global Technology, Media and Telecom Conference shortly after Sprint announced the handset’s street date, Hesse said he anticipates that supplies will be limited, at least initially.
The great truism about rebates is that anything less than 100 percent redemption is free money for the companies offering them. That’s something Palm and Sprint are clearly counting on as they bring Palm’s new Pre handset to market with a $100 rebate.
It’s almost as if Sprint Nextel’s postpaid customers can hardly wait for their contracts to expire so they can jump to another carrier. The troubled wireless carrier lost more than one million postpaids in the first quarter of 2009 amid fierce competition from rivals AT&T and Verizon Wireless.
Sprint hasn’t yet disclosed how long its exclusivity period for Palm’s new Pre handset will be, but a person familiar with the matter told Reuters Thursday that it will run through the end of 2009, and that was good enough for the company’s long-suffering investors.
John Paczkowski has been poking fun at the tech industry and the personalities that drive it since 1997. From 1999 to 2007, he wrote the award-winning tech news Web log Good Morning Silicon Valley for the San Jose Mercury News, Silicon Valley's daily newspaper. Read more »
Here is a statement of my ethics and coverage policies. It is more than most of you want to know, but, in the age of suspicion of the media, I am laying it all out.
12:58 AM: Breakfast: Two schools of fish from Tokyo Bay. Calories: 782,000. How I was feeling when I ate this: confused, irradiated, hating my size.
11:37 AM: Exercise: “Taxi Stomp” (alternating legs, for 30 blocks). Calories burned: 148,900,183.
1983. The Beatles announce their first tour in thirteen years, but likewise announce that Michael Jackson will be going on tour with them as a one gigantic mega-concert event.
Best video mashup ever.
A Facebook Memorial
Wow.
Worth it for the Rickrolling photo alone.
Excellent.
Flughumor!
… you vacuous, toffee-nosed, malodorous perverts
Stephen Fry and zoologist Mark Carwardine meet the kakapo — a fat, flightless and very randy rare parrot.
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