Telecom Lead America: Sprint Nextel’s fourth quarter revenue increased to $9 billion from $8.72 billion.
Its full year 2012 revenue increased to $35.3 billion from $33.67 billion.
Sprint’s wireless service revenue was $7 billion in Q4, up 12 percent.
In 2012, it recorded wireless service revenue of $27.1 billion, up 15 percent.
The third-largest U.S. wireless carrier said growth drivers for increase in revenue were increasing postpaid ARPU and continued Sprint platform subscriber growth.
The mobile operator reported net loss of $1.3 billion for the fourth quarter of 2012 as compared to a net loss of $1.3 billion in Q4 2011.
Sprint, which is part of Japan’s Softbank, said net loss was impacted by charges from the expected shutdown of the Nextel network.
Sprint lost 243,000 net contract subscribers in the fourth quarter, compared with losses of 456,000 in the prior quarter and a gain of 161,00 a year earlier. The Sprint brand added 401,000 contract customers while the Nextel platform lost 644,000 contract subscribers. The company ended the quarter with 55.6 million total customers, up 1.1 percent from a year earlier.
Sprint sold approximately 2.2 million iPhones in the fourth quarter with 38 percent picked up by new customers.
As of the end of the fourth quarter, Sprint had sold more than 4 million 4G LTE smartphones.
As part of Network Vision, Sprint has launched 4G LTE in 58 cities and expects that 4G LTE will be available in nearly 170 additional cities in the coming months.
