Sprint Releases Q1 2012 Earnings: 1.5m iPhones Sold, $863m Net Loss

With Apple announcing yesterday that well over 30 million iPhones were sold last quarter, surely Sprint had a hand in helping out there, right? Right. But they didn't ship nearly as many as Verizon, AT&T or a lot of other global carriers. According to the carrier's numbers, they managed to sell around 1.5 million of Apple's phones in their Q1 2012. That's double the amount they sold last quarter, but still not enough to save them from an overall operating loss of $255 million. The good news is that Sprint racked up lots of new subscribers on the iPhone front; 44% of iPhones were sold to people who weren't on Sprint beforehand. Overall, postpaid subscribers were lifted to 263,000.


Still, the net loss for the quarter totaled $863 million, which is pretty tough news all around. Granted, Sprint is still in a weird in-between stage with WiMAX deployed (but usage on the outs), and LTE in mind (but well behind Verizon and AT&T). Sprint's sure trying to do everything right, but it'll still be a while before they can even compete on even terms with 4G networks. Maybe giving away the iPhone 4S on contract would work? Oh, that's right, they're trying to make money here...