iPhone on Sprint: Great for sales, terrible for profits
(Read article summary)iPhone helped drive up activation numbers for Sprint. Still, the company posted a major loss in the last quarter of 2011, thanks to the iPhone.
The Apple iPhone was the top-selling smartphone of the last quarter, according to a new report from the International Data Corporation – the king of a smartphone market that has expanded by as much as 55 percent over the past year. It makes sense, therefore, that a company such as Sprint, which recently began selling the iPhone, would see a major hike in profits.
But as several outlets have reported this afternoon, the situation isn't quite that simple. Consider the Q4 numbers posted by Sprint: 1.8 million iPhones sold, to a record number of first-time customers. At the same time, since Sprint must subsidize the cost of every iPhone, Sprint's subsidy costs have also soared, to the tune of $1.7 billion over the course of the last quarter of 2011.
"The dilemma is that the more iPhones sold, the bigger the near-term hit," Roger Cheng of CNET writes today. CNN frames the whole thing a little more starkly: "Subsidies almost single-handedly devastate profit margins" for carriers, CNN reporter David Goldman argues. Sprint, for its part, has noted that the Q4 sales beat expectations; in a conference call, Sprint CEO Dan Hesse called the iPhone launch "very successful."
