Sprint: Nextel Biz Value Plummets

Despite a recent statement of commitment to Nextel-based service for at least the next five years, Sprint Nextel Corp. today reported that it wrote off a remarkable $29.5 billion associated with the Nextel portion of the business that offers push-to-talk and other services used by thousands of public safety customers. The write-off of so-called “goodwill,” part of an regular annual assessment, essentially represents what the company paid for the company originally, and what it’s worth today. Sprint paid $35 billion for Nextel back in 2005. The company didn’t say what factors triggered the write-down. The third-largest carrier had mixed results for the latest quarter: average revenue per user and the number of post-paid customers decreased. However, data revenues and pre-paid customer numbers were up. Even worse, Sprint forecast that it would lose another 1.2 customers during the current quarter, after losing 108,000 customers in the previous quarter. At the end of 2007 they had 17.3 million subscribers for its Nextel iDEN service, compared to 35 million on its Spring CDMA platform.