Sprint – Apple’s iPhone carrier partner in the US announced their first quarter financial results earlier today.
They’ve reported net operating revenue of $8.7 billion, a net loss of $863 million and a diluted net loss of $.29 per share for the first quarter of 2012.
Sprint announced that they’ve activated 1.5 million iPhones in the last quarter, this was compared to 3.2 million iPhones activated by Verizon and 4.3 million iPhones activated by AT&T.
Dan Hesse, Sprint CEO had this to say about the results:
“The continuing revenue growth on the Sprint platform, which represents the future of our company, driven by record ARPU improvement and strong net subscriber growth, contributed to our Adjusted OIBDA* performance of $1.2 billion. The value and simplicity of our unlimited data, talk and text plans, combined with an unsurpassed customer experience and our increasingly robust device portfolio make for a strong combination.”
1.5 million iPhone activations isn’t too bad when you consider that Sprint subscriber base is roughly half the size of AT&T and Verizon, however it does suggest that Sprint’s unlimited data plans, which is Sprint’s key differentiator, is not resulting in a flood of customers switching to Sprint from AT&T and Verizon who offer capped data plans. But the iPhone does seem to help Sprint to keep the churn rate in check.
With Apple’s next generation iPhone widely expected to support faster 4G LTE networks, Sprint may have even more tough times ahead due to the delayed roll out of its 4G LTE network. Sprint has announced that it will launch its 4G LTE network in the middle of this year, whereas Verizon 4G LTE network already covers two-thirds of the population in the US.
Apple sold 35.1 million iPhones in the last quarter, so based on the iPhone activation numbers announced by AT&T, Sprint and Verizon, more that three-fourths of the iPhones were sold internationally.
[via Sprint]
