Sprint chief deploys ‘iPhone for Life’ plan
SAN FRANCISCO — Sprint introduced an “iPhone for Life” plan that lets customers get a new version of Apple’s smartphone every two years as it moves to win back customers lost to rivals including T-Mobile US.
The service costs $70 a month and includes unlimited data, Sprint said on its website Tuesday. Customers make no initial payment for the phone or related taxes on the device because they are essentially renting it, the company said.
Chief executive Marcelo Claure is counting on the new iPhone 6 to help Sprint start adding subscribers again after a seven-year streak of customer losses. By tying promotions to Apple’s device, Sprint is following in the footsteps of controlling shareholder SoftBank, which used an exclusive iPhone deal to gain market share in Japan.
“I challenge anyone in this industry to beat this,” Claure said in an interview Tuesday. “Nobody is going to do it.”
Sprint is up against steep promotions from its competitors, which are clamoring to use Apple’s new iPhone to drive customer growth. Verizon Communications is offering an iPhone 6 for free to customers who trade in older models and sign up for a new two-year contract. The offer comes in the form of a $200 gift card that can be applied to the regular $199.99 price for the basic 16-gigabyte version of the device.
The Verizon offer is a “gimmick,” Claure said. A two-year smartphone contract on Verizon starts at $70 a month for 500 megabytes of data, according to its website.
After spending his first week at Sprint talking to employees, Claure, who took over Aug. 11, said he’s been chatting with customers ever since. That’s what led him to conclude they’d be attracted to unlimited-data plans for the iPhone, eliminating their concern that they could go over their alloted megabytes each month.
“I’m skipping my employees and going straight to my customers,” he said. “We’re going to play unlimited, because we have the capacity to offer unlimited.”
Claure said only Sprint’s ownership of high-capacity spectrum, acquired last year with the purchase of Clearwire, makes it possible for the company to offer unlimited-data plans, while AT&T and Verizon have been pushing heavy users of bandwidth to go to capped plans.
Earlier this week, Sprint said it would match other wireless companies’ deals for smartphone trade-ins, similar to an offer that smaller rival T-Mobile announced earlier the same day. The trade-in campaigns are designed to lure customers who want to upgrade to the new iPhone 6.