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Sprint Stays Relevant for Baby Boomers With Affordable Plan

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Sprint (S - Free Report) has announced the launch of “Unlimited 55+”, which offers affordable unlimited data plans to customers of age 55 and above. This will bring Sprint on par with T-Mobile US, Inc. (TMUS - Free Report) , which launched an unlimited data plan for senior citizens in August last year.

Sprint’s Move to Catch Up With Competitors

Sprint, one of the leaders of the U.S telecom industry, has an impressive history of evolving constantly to meet various customer requirements. The United States is typically an aging population and older people will likely outnumber children for the first time in the history by 2035, according to new projections by the Census Bureau.

As more and more seniors enter the smartphone market, the need to devise new data plans to target this set of customers keeps rising. Naturally, a higher proportion of users falling in this age group are retirees with ample leisure time and limited disposable income. This makes it important for telecom companies to design customized unlimited data plans. However, Sprint is already behind its strongest competitors like Verizon Communications Inc. (VZ - Free Report) and T-Mobile when it comes to senior customer base.

Its new plan offers unlimited data, talk and text and is available over two lines — $50 per month and $20 per month. This brings the dual-line plan for senior customers at $70 per month compared with the $100 for the regular dual-line plan. Customers can also choose to purchase just one line for $50 per month. This plan supports global roaming and includes mobile hotspot data facility at 3G speed.

Sprint’s Unlimited 55+ plan offers almost the same benefits as its counterpart, One Unlimited 55+ by T-Mobile. The only difference lies in the roaming data speeds, where Sprint offers a speed ceiling of 50 kbps whereas T-Mobile offers 128 kbps. This plan is expected to bring back lost customers for Sprint and prevent current customers from switching to other networks.

Price Performance

In the past three months, the stock has lost 4.4% on an average compared with a decline of 5.1% for the industry. Whether the strategic Unlimited 55+ plan can boost Sprint’s performance remains to be seen.



Zacks Rank and A Stock to Consider

Sprint currently has a Zacks Rank #3 (Hold). A better-ranked stock in the space is BlackBerry Limited (BB - Free Report) , sporting a Zacks Rank #1 (Strong Buy). You can see the complete list of today’s Zacks #1 Rank stocks here.

BlackBerry has an expected long-term earnings growth rate of 18.6%.

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