Sprint is expected to announce a new CEO in place of Dan Hesse on Wednesday, CNBC reported.
The report does not mention specific reasons for appointing a new CEO.
Sprint, which is likely to drop plans to continue its bid for T-Mobile, is already under pressure from its rivals — Verizon Wireless and AT&T. Sprint will be unable to grow revenue and subscribers in H2 2014 as it continues to be pressured by an anemic wireline business and strong competition in the post-paid market, said a TBR report.
The company’s plans to abandon its bid for T-Mobile USA is happening at a time when both AT&T and Comcast are attempting to amass more scale with $40+ billion merger reviews before the FCC and DOJ.
Sprint, owned by Softbank of Japan, lost 864,000 total retail subscribers in Q2 2014 and reported a year-to-year decline in corporate and wireless service revenue, yet the wireless business grew 0.2 percent in Q2 2014 due to its growing wireless equipment revenue.
Eric Costa, telecom analyst at TBR, said recently: “Sprint’s subscriber and revenue losses will continue to plague the operator in 2H14 due to the lack of differentiated offerings and a competitive market.”
There are other concerns as well. The result of increased tablet additions, in addition to postpaid price reductions, is negatively impacting Sprint’s ARPU.
The report said this trend will continue through H2 2014 and it will result in total ARPU dropping below $50 in Q3 2014. To combat the decline in ARPU, Sprint will drive customer adoption on its Framily plans which will help increase long term data revenue growth. The tablet subscribers will also drive increased LTE data usage, which will strengthen Sprint’s data ARPU over the next two years.
editor@telecomlead.com
