T-Mobile CEO not so sure about passing up Sprint in subscribers

About that prediction...

T-Mobile’s chief executive isn’t so sure his company was able to pass Sprint Corp. to become the nation’s third largest wireless carrier by the end of 2014. It’s a boast that John Legere had made last summer.

On Tuesday, he backed off a bit.

“Oh wait… I forgot one important thing…,” Legere wrote in a blog post packed with predictions for 2015.

“T-Mobile will – officially – become the No. 3 wireless company in America in 2015. This summer, I said we’d blow by Sprint by the end of 2014 to become the No. 3 wireless company in the US. They have been swinging the bat since I made that statement, so we won’t know where things stand until we get the final score after we both report Q4 (fourth quarter) earnings, but whether it is now – or soon – I’m telling you, it’s a done deal!”

Legere didn’t call it a “done deal” when he first predicted passing up Sprint. “There, I said it,” was his less emphatic choice of words.

His boast came just as Sprint dropped its designs on gobbling up T-Mobile in a merger to rival the industry giants AT&T and Verizon. Legere had been the odds-on favorite to run the merged companies, though nothing official had been announced.

Instead, Sprint replaced longtime CEO Dan Hesse with Marcelo Claure, a self-made billionaire businessman in Miami.

Claure quickly revamped Sprint’s marketing campaign and introduced various promotions to lure customers. Mostly, Claure has targeted customers of Verizon and AT&T, rather than T-Mobile.

CEO chatter suggests Claure’s push is working.

In a Twitter post last Sunday, he told a customer who complained about long waits that Sprint has been “overwhelmed by our Christmas campaign.”

And now Legere has had to defer his prediction of passing up Sprint.

This story was originally published December 31, 2014 at 10:11 AM with the headline "T-Mobile CEO not so sure about passing up Sprint in subscribers."