San Diego — Leap Wireless reported it had lost 337,000 net subscribers.
Sixty percent of the losses were the result of dropping multiple national retailers to focus on fewer more productive national chains, a decision to stop marketing daily prepaid PayGo service to new customers beginning last October, and continued de-emphasis on marketing Cricket Broadband data service to laptops and mobile hot-spot devices, the company said.
The carrier’s year-end subscriber base stood at 5.3 million, down 10.7 percent from a year ago, but the company nonetheless shrank its fourth-quarter and full-year net loss.
For the quarter, total revenues fell 1.5 percent to $756 million, but for the year, revenues were up 2.3 percent to $2.14 billion.
Operating income in the quarter hit $60.6 million compared with a year-ago operating loss of $3.6 million, and full-year operating income grew to $157.8 million compared with 2011’s $25.4 million operating loss.
Net losses for the quarter came to $73.8 million, or 6 percent less than the year-ago loss of $78.7 million. The net loss for the year also shrank 41 percent to $187.3 million from 2011’s net loss of $317.7 million.
