Sprint Sold 1.8 Million iPhones, Added 1.6M Subscribers and Still Lost $1.3 billion

Phone carriers in the United States are having great success with the iPhone. The iPhone accounts for 80% of AT&T smartphones sold in the previous quarter and 45% of Verizon. On Sprint, 1.6 million iPhones were sold over the first quarter. What’s more is that 40% of those iPhone sales at Sprint were from incoming customers who were opening new lines.

While it may sound like good news for Sprint, those new customers and new iPhone sales were cut short, very short, due to an expensive deal with Apple for the new phone. It is estimated that more than $600 million of the operating income before depreciation and amortization was lost to subsidies to Apple.

Bringing it back to some good news for Sprint, the 55-million customers they now have is a company record, average revenues per user also increased by an astonishing $3.69 and sales overall were up five percent to $8.72b.

Here’s hoping for some sustained growth from the Now Network so we can keep the big two in AT&T and Verizon in check!