On August 3rd Sprint Nextel held an investor relations conference call for their 2nd quarter financial report. During this conference call many interesting statements were made. Some of which include…
*The IC-502 Dual mode phone will be available for the holidays, but only “several hundred thousand” will be available for the holidays. With several million available in 2007. Now this is going to be hard to take for some, but…all dual mode phones are going to be targeted at Nextel’s iDEN customers. As Sprint Nextel is pinning their hopes that the IC-502 will begin the mass migration of customers from iDEN to CDMA.
*Account Spending Limits (ASL)will be going away for some ASL customers. Those with a solid payment history over the last 2 years will be moved off of the ASL program.
*Tighter credit requirements, especially in re-banding markets. Since these markets now have less spectrum available, tighter credit standards will be used to help control net adds in these markets. In effect trying to keep the network from being over capacity. Deposits will be rising also to be more in line with Sprint Nextels competitors in all markets.
*The long awaited 4G announcement is coming yet this month.
*In general we will be seeing less and less advertising for the Nextel brand, in preparation for the eventual “mass migration” to Sprints CDMA network. Have you ever heard the phrase “out of sight, out of mind”? This is Sprint Nextel philosophy toward their Nextel consumer base. Business marketing and sports marketing (NASCAR) will continue though.
*Speaking of business customers, much of Sprint Nextels lower ARPU in the 2nd quarter (50%) was blamed on business customers migrating to the new lower priced Nextel plans. Lower MRC’s = lower ARPU. Nobody at Sprint Nextel saw this coming. So as of AUG.1st business plan pricing was adjusted. Read “plan prices were raised” to compensate for the lower MRCs of the previous plans.
*Motorola phones namely the RAZR, Q and SLVR are coming to Sprint later this year. This decision was made over 6 month’s ago.
*The street level maps that everybody has been asking for…well they are finally coming. As to when they will be launched? Thats a good question, as no time frame was given.
UPDATE
*Sprint Nextel does have a stragety to fix it’s confusing marketing plan that is currently being used. The new marketing strategy is being called “Power Up”, and is centered around how powerful both the CDMA and iDEN networks are. Emphasizing both coverage and data benefits of both networks.
*Qchat was briefly mentioned as bieng very promising in lab tests. With 2008 mentioned for the launch of Qchat.
*Customer Service is getting some system upgrades on the CDMA side. The upgrades are being modeled after Nextels Customer Service. One system instead of multiple systems to view customer information. With 30 second bieng the goal for answering all calls to *2.
