AppleInsider Staff
Sprint on Thursday announced its earnings for the fourth quarter of 2012, revealing it sold a best-ever 2.2 million iPhones, bringing its total 2012 sales to 6.6 million.
Of the 2.2 million iPhones sold in the December quarter, 38 percent of those were to new customers. And 40 percent of the 6.6 million iPhones sold in all of 2012 were to customers new to the carrier.
As of the fourth quarter, Sprint had sold more than 4 million 4G LTE smartphones, including Apple's iPhone 5, which debuted in September.
Sprint sold a total of nearly 20 million smartphones in 2012. In the fourth quarter, 89 percent of postpaid handset sales were smartphones.
Sprint's high-speed 4G LTE network, compatible with both the iPhone 5 and Apple's latest iPads, is now available in a total of 58 cities. The carrier expects to expand to nearly 170 more in the coming months, and construction has started in more than 450 cities.
For the quarter, Sprint reported a net loss of $1.3 billion. Dan Hesse, the company's chief executive, attributed part of that loss to subsidies associated with Apple's iPhone, which he said is one of the company's "key investments."
The 2.2 million iPhones sold by Sprint are an increase from the 1.5 million the carrier had activated over the last three consecutive quarters. The carrier had surpassed 1 million LTE smartphones just before the launch of the iPhone 5.
Christine McKee
Andrew Orr
Charles Martin
Marko Zivkovic
Wesley Hilliard
30 Comments
Do any carriers outside of the US report iphone sales data. Only ever seem to see US or sometimes china listed here.
"New customers" from Spint's perspective. Not necessarily mean people who switch from another platform to iPhone. For all they care, "new customer" include iPhone users who switch over from AT&T and Verizon. Still, another 2.2M iPhones can only be a good thing.
[quote name="zoffdino" url="/t/155854/sprint-sold-best-ever-2-2m-iphones-in-holiday-quarter-38-to-new-customers#post_2272775"]"New customers" from Spint's perspective. Not necessarily mean people who switch from another platform to iPhone. For all they care, "new customer" include iPhone users who switch over from AT&T and Verizon. Still, another 2.2M iPhones can only be a good thing.[/quote] True, but the AT&T and Verizon numbers for iPhones sold were nothing to sneeze at, either.
What is unusual, is reporting sales instead of activations, like Verizon and AT&T always do.
(There are usually at least 10% more activations than sales, due to used phones being reactivated by their new owners. Thus, reporting activations usually boosts the number that reporters will print -- and mistakenly use in percentage calculations.)
Sprint, being fairly new to the iPhone, wouldn't have as many used devices.
Reporting sales instead might mean that activations were less than sales during that period. This could happen if enough sales were presents that didn't get activated until just after the end of the reporting period.
Nothing wrong with that, of course. It can be more useful to see actual sales reported.
Bottom line Apple is doing fine regardless of what Wall Street thinks. But all things eventually end and the smartphone market will mature and saturate too. What's the next market Apple can disrupt and remake? And make no mistake, if it's going to be done Apple will do it. It won't be Samsung or HP. The others just sit back and wait for Apple then jump on after the hard hauling is done.