$25M investment bolsters Sprint stock price
Sprint’s stock price surged 7% on Friday, which in some corners was attributed to news that CEO Marcelo Claure picked up 5 million shares of the company’s common stock for nearly $25 million.
According to a Form 4 filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Claure made the purchases between Feb. 25 and 26. The majority of shares were purchased on Feb. 25 at $4.92 per share, with the remaining purchased the following day at $4.94 per share.
Sprint’s stock (S) closed Friday up 7.3% at $5.12 per share, having bounced between $3.79 and $9.76 per share over the past year.
Claure was brought on last August to replace long-time Sprint CEO Dan Hesse, who led Sprint through a challenging network upgrade program that impacted the carrier’s reputation in the minds of consumers. Prior to taking the leadership position at Sprint, Claure was on the company’s board following Sprint parent company Softbank’s $1.26 billion acquisition of device logistics provider Brightstar, which Claure founded.
As part of his move to Sprint, Claure received a $500,000 signing bonus, was set to be paid $1.5 million per year in base salary – with an initial year performance bonus potential of 250% of that salary – and a 200% performance bonus potential for Sprint’s 2015 fiscal year.
With Claure at the helm, Sprint has managed to stabilize its customer base on the back of aggressive pricing. Those actions saw the carrier post nearly 1 million net connection additions for the final three months of last year, which was nearly double what it managed the previous year. However, that number included just 30,000 direct postpaid connections, which are seen as the highest value in the market.
Financially, Sprint posted flat year-over-year revenues for the quarter and $2.2 billion in net losses, though most of that loss was tied to a $1.9 billion write-down in the value of the Sprint brand.
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