Sprint has lost tends of thousands of key customers to rivals such as AT&T Inc. and Verizon Wireless, hurt by poor customer service and lackluster selection of handsets. The company recently hired a new chief executive, Dan Hesse, to fix its ailing wireless division.
Yet Hesse said Sprint is in worse shape than he thought and that the company's struggles won't end anytime soon, particularly with the U.S. economy turning south.
"I now have had two full months at the helm, and to be perfectly frank, the issues we face are more difficult than what I had expected to find," Hess said in a conference call with analysts.
In the first quarter, Sprint predicted it would lose a whopping 1.2 million postpaid customers, with the potential for a similarly steep decline in the second quarter. That's the same number of postpaid customers Sprint lost in all of 2007.
