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Sprint Adds 1 Million Wireless Customers in Fourth Quarter

Posted on: Tuesday, 6 January 2004, 06:00 CST

Jan. 7--KANSAS CITY, Mo.--Sprint Corp. added about 1 million wireless customers during the fourth quarter, a number bolstered by healthy subscriber growth from partners like Virgin Mobile.

Sprint's wireless division added 390,000 subscribers during the quarter, while affiliates and partners added 610,000 customers, said Gary Forsee, the company's chief executive. Forsee formally announced the fourth-quarter numbers during a meeting with financial analysts Tuesday afternoon in Phoenix.

The company's two tracking stocks closed higher on the news. FON closed at $17.68, up 68 cents. PCS closed at $6.01, up 12 cents.

Forsee told analysts that the company's new organizational chart, which includes business and consumer divisions, will lead to continued growth. "This is as much about growth as it is to ensure that we have a competitive cost structure going forward," Forsee said of the transformation the company undertook during 2003.

Sprint's new structure will help more products to each customer, Forsee said.

"We really are taking advantage of looking at our business holistically," he said.

Forsee said the company had shed 8,000 employees since January 2003 as a result of the reorganization and other cost-cutting initiatives. Since October 2001 more than 21,000 jobs have been cut. Currently the company has approximately 68,000 employees worldwide, including some 19,000 in the Kansas City area.

The company also trimmed costs during 2003 by scrapping an internal wireless billing system in development, outsourcing several hundred information technology jobs, and writing off a broadband wireless service.

Sprint's subscriber numbers for October, November and December indicated that the company did not lose as many customers as expected when a new measure went into effect that allowed customers to keep their current wireless phone number when changing companies. Analysts had expected Sprint and AT&T Wireless to lose customers while Verizon Wireless and T-Mobile gained.

Sprint said its customer churn rate -- the percentage of customer who drop the service -- was 2.7 percent during the fourth quarter, in line with the previous quarter. The three-month period included five weeks under the federal portability rules.

The company added 1.1 million customers during 2003, while affiliates and partners added more than 900,000. The new numbers mean that the total number of wireless customers using the Sprint PCS network topped 20 million for the first time.

Sprint has agreements with a number of affiliates that run Sprint's wireless service in smaller cities. In addition, Sprint owns 50 percent of Virgin Mobile, which now has more than 1 million subscribers.

Sprint also announced Tuesday that it now has 300,000 subscribers using its high-speed digital subscriber line, or DSL, service. About 280,000 customers have signed up for Sprint Sense, which offers competitive local phone service.

By David Hayes and Suzanne King

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To see more of The Kansas City Star, or to subscribe to the newspaper, go to http://www.kansascity.com.

(c) 2004, The Kansas City Star, Mo. Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News.

FON, AWE, VZ, VOD, DT,

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