Sprint stock on the rise after announcing $1.4B loss, 1.5M iPhones sold

Sprint’s stock price continues to confound today by rising, even though the company missed analyst expectations by reporting a $1.37 billion loss for the second quarter of 2012.

At the time of this post, Sprint’s stock was up 18 percent in pre-market trading at $3.97. Sprint announced a loss of 46 cents a share, while analysts were anticipating a loss of 41 cents a share. In comparison, Sprint reported a net loss of $847 million last year.

Despite the loss, Sprint upped its earnings guidance to between $4.5 billion and $4.6 billion from its previous guidance of $3.7 billion to $3.9 billion, which spurred on investors.

Much of Sprint’s loss was due to the rollout of its 4G LTE network, which launched in 15 cities a few weeks ago, as well as other network improvements. The company says it has completed the shutdown of 9,600 Nextel sites, which powered an aging push-to-talk network that’s practically irrelevant in the age of smartphones. Sprint managed to keep 60 percent of Nextel customers on its network.

The carrier says it added 442,000 postpaid subscribers, but that was coupled with a loss of 688,000 subscribers from the Nextel platform. Sprint overall had 56 million customers at the end of the quarter, including contracted, prepaid, and affiliate subscribers.

Sprint sold around 1.5 million iPhones this quarter, compared to AT&T’s 3.7 million and Verizon’s 2.7 million. Sprint’s iPhone sales notably didn’t drop as much as its competitors, but given that the carrier bet pretty much everything on the iPhone, it certainly could be performing better.

Photo via Consumerist on Flickr