Mixed Financial Results Reported By Sprint/Nextel And T-Mobile

Sprint Nextel's loss appears to be T-Mobile USA's gain as the two mobile phone companies announced their fourth quarter results. Sprint lost 306,000 post-pay customers while T-Mobile added 783,000 post-pay customers.

Still struggling to integrate Nextel into its business, Sprint is betting on its deployment of advanced 3G and WiMax services, but many subscribers aren't waiting for the new services to be completely rolled out. Sprint, however, did have some good news as it reported that the quarter's $9 billion in revenue was up 9% over the fourth quarter in 2005.

As for T-Mobile, it reported Thursday that its 901,000 total net new customers pushed its total subscriber population past the 25 million milestone. T-Mobile USA, a separate operating unit of Deutsche Telekom, said its operating income before depreciation and amortization for the quarter was $1.17 billion, down from $1.23 billion in the third quarter of 2006. In its report, T-Mobile noted that $4.18 billion has been paid for parts of the wireless spectrum that will more than double its average spectrum holdings in the top 100 U.S. markets.

While Deutsche Telekom reported improved results in several European markets, the company firm singled out the U.S. operation for praise -- and for increased investment.

"T-Mobile USA is playing an increasingly vital role in bringing a service leadership culture to all of DT," said Rene Obermann, DT's chief executive officer, in a statement. "At more than 25 million customers and growing, the U.S. business continues to assert its position as the leading growth driver for Deutsche Telekom."

Sprint's chairman and CEO Gary Forsee acknowledged the company was having difficulty merging the Sprint and Nextel operations, but he said network investments were increasingly paying off.

"We are seeing early returns from these investments as we widen our lead in wireless data services on the CDMA platform and with the iDEN (Nextel's network) now delivering substantially improved call quality metrics," Forsee said in a statement.