By Angela Chen
Sprint Corp. Chief Executive Marcelo Claure purchased more than
5 million shares of his company's stock this week, less than a
month after the company reported weak full-year results amid
struggles to keep customers.
Shares of Sprint jumped on the news, recently rising 6.8% to
$5.10 in midday trading. The stock has fallen about 41% over the
past 12 months.
Mr. Claure paid about $25 million for the 5.08 million shares,
purchased at an average price of $4.92 in separate transactions
Wednesday and Thursday, according to a regulatory filing Friday.
Mr. Claure joined the company in August after serving on the board
since January 2014.
Sprint, which was bought by Japanese technology conglomerate
SoftBank Corp. in 2013, has found itself struggling in third place
in the U.S. market. It lost 205,000 mainstream "postpaid" cellphone
customers in the final three months of the year, booked a higher
monthly customer loss rate and wrote down the value of its
trademark by $1.9 billion. The results extended a streak of
customer losses, and revenue declined 1.8% over the past year.
However, the size of the losses is shrinking. And while its free
cash flow--the cash produced by its operations minus capital
expenditures--was a negative $1.8 billion last year, that was about
$1 billion smaller than its deficit in the year-earlier quarter.
The carrier predicted earnings before some adjustments--a figure it
previously thought could be flat--would grow between 5% and 7% in
2015.
Write to Angela Chen at angela.chen@dowjones.com
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