“Sprint Corp. introduced an ‘iPhone for Life’ plan that lets customers get a new version of Apple Inc.’s smartphone every two years for a fee of $70 a month,” Peter Burrows and Scott Moritz report for Bloomberg. “The service also includes unlimited data, Sprint said today on its website. 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 Officer 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 Corp., which used an exclusive iPhone deal to gain market share in Japan,” Burrows and Moritz report. “‘I challenge anyone in this industry to beat this,’ Claure said today in an interview. ‘Nobody is going to do it.'”
“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,” Burrows and Moritz report. “‘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.'”
Read more in the full article here.