Japan's Softbank revealed its net sales for the first nine months of the year grew 94% to 4.6 trillion yen ($44.9 billion), thanks to its Sprint acquisition and healthy domestic growth.
Net profit for the nine month period grew 58% to 488.2 billion yen, the company announced. Sprint contributed 1.7 trillion yen towards net sales, but just 200 billion to the company's 1.3 trillion in ebitda.
For the fourth quarter, acquisition costs led to a 13.4% decline in net profit to 97.25 billion yen.
The company added 4.1 million Japanese mobile customers across its Softbank, Willcom and Emobile brands, taking its total customer base to 44.66 million. Adding the Sprint customers, the company ended the nine-month period with over 100 million mobile subscribers across Japan and the US.
Softbank arranged in June to pay $21.6 billion for a 78% stake in Sprint Nextel, beating out rival bids from Dish Network.
Japanese mobile service revenue grew to 1.54 trillion yen during the nine-month period, up from 1.74 trillion a year earlier.
Softbank CEO Masayoshi Son used the company's earnings call to make his case for the proposed acquisition of T-Mobile USA and its merger with Sprint, Bloombergreported.
He said without such consolidation, the company's goal of making Sprint the top US mobile operator is “literally just a dream.”
Increasing Sprint's scale would let the company pursue the strategy of offering aggressive discounts that allowed Softbank to grow so quickly in Japan, he added.
Son and Sprint CEO Dan Hesse reportedly met with the US FCC last week to discuss a potential merger, and whether a combination of the USA's third and fourth largest mobile operators would be allowed under competition rules.