It's been a while since we've had any new financial reports to share with you, but today Sprint ended that drought by sharing its fourth quarter 2012 earnings with us. Sprint says that it added a total of 605,000 subscribers in the quarter, which includes gains of 401,000 postpaid customers and 525,000 prepaid subs, as well as a loss of 243,000 wholesale users. Meanwhile, Nextel dropped a little over a million customers in the quarter. At the end of the quarter, Sprint had a total of 55.6 million subscribers.
On the handset side of things, Sprint CEO Dan Hesse said during the carrier's earnings call that his company sold over 6.1 million smartphones during the quarter. Around 2.2 million of those devices were iPhones, 38 percent of which were to new customers, with a total of 6.6 million iPhones sold by Sprint in 2012. Hesse also revealed that Sprint was the top seller of Samsung's Galaxy S III during the fourth quarter. Finally, Sprint reported that it moved more than 4 million 4G LTE-capable handsets.
Sprint's financials for the fourth quarter included a consolidated net operating revenue of $9 billion, while the full-year operating revenue finished at $35.3 billion. Overall the Now Network finished Q4 with a net loss of $1.3 billion. Sprint says that some of the reasons for its loss include the accelerated shutdown of its Nextel network as well as impacts from Hurricane Sandy.
It looks like Sprint's Q4 2012 was a bit of a mixed bag, with Hesse and Co. taking a bit of a hit with its financials during the quarter but adding quite a few postpaid subscribers and selling a nice pile of smartphones as well. Sprint also notes that its lit up 58 markets with its 4G LTE coverage, with nearly 170 others in the coming months. We're listening in on Sprint's Q4 2012 earnings call as this is going up, so stay tuned and we'll update you with any other juicy details that the execs on the call divulge.
Via Sprint
