Sprint: iPhone brought 40 percent of new signups in Q4


1.8 million units of the iPhone model were sold in the last three months of 2011, or in other words just a quarter of the amount of iPhones sold in the same time frame by AT&T. But this is actually good news for the third-largest mobile carrier in the US, and they announced its quarterly earnings last a few days back.

The reason for that is because, of the 1.8 million iPhones the carrier sold, 40 percent of them went to new customers that became customers of the carrier for the iPhone. We already knew the iPhone was fairly popular on Sprint’s network — the carrier sold out of its stock of the iPhone 4S the first day it was available back in October, but the fact that 40% of them are new to Sprint’s network is a huge deal.

Although the amount of iPhones sold may pale when compared to the sales figures of its competitors, it was Sprint’s first ever quarter selling the iPhone, after all so we need to look at it from that angle. AT&T sold 7.6 million iPhones during the quarter, but the carrier had a nearly four-year head start on Sprint. Verizon, during AT&T’s dominance and Sprint’s growth, sold 4.2 million iPhones last quarter.

Though new customers are pushing and shoving through the door, it’s still costing Spring quite a bit of extra dough.

The carrier had stated on Wednesday that the price of the subsidies it has paid in the quarter went from $1.2 billion, up 500 million dollars to $1.7 billion during last year and which was ”primarily due to the launch of the iPhone 4 and iPhone 4S, which on average carry a higher subsidy rate per handset as compared to other handsets.”