Motorola isn’t the only US mobile company doing really badly at the moment – US mobile phone telco Sprint Nextel Corp is seemingly doing much, much worse. After losing a million customers in the last three months alone, the company has announced a $505 million loss for the same period. One of the reasons is the success of the iPhone, which helped iPhone carrier and Sprint arch-enemy AT&T to gain 1.3 million customers during the same period.

However, the iPhone isn’t the only reason – Verizon also notched up an extra 1.5 million customers, yet it doesn’t carry the iPhone. No, the major reason is Sprint’s recent purchase of rival Nextel, which has led to a plethora of poor service complaints from customers, causing them to leave in their, well, million! Worse, Nextel cost Sprint $36 billion, yet may now only be worth just $5 billion – a $31 billion loss! Ouch! In response, Sprint has fired 4,000 of its employees, closed outlets, and has just begun a fierce price war to gain new customers, but it may be too little too late.

So the iPhone may not be the sole reason that Sprint is in trouble, just as it’s not the sole reason that Motorola’s handset business is also recording record losses – it’s just that it doesn’t exactly help them either!

[Source: Bloomberg]