Today we're rounding out the fourth quarter 2012 financial reports from the big four U.S. carriers, as T-Mobile has officially released its results for the quarter. T-Mobile reports that it lost 515,000 postpaid subscribers in the final months of 2012, an increase from the loss of 492,000 subscribers in Q3 2012. The magenta operator says that while its network improvements and value-priced offerings have lowered its customer deactivations, promotions from competing carriers as well as the launch of the iPhone 5 caused an increase in customer losses from the previous quarter. Prepaid additions for the quarter finished at 166,000. At the end of Q4 2012, T-Mobile says that it had a total of 33,389,000 customers.
Moving on to the financial side of things, T-Mobile reports that it finished Q4 2012 with a total revenue of $4.9 billion. Service revenues for the quarter totaled $4.1 billion, which is down from the $4.3 billion that T-Mo saw in Q3 2012. Finally, prepaid revenues for the fourth quarter actually grew compared to both Q3 2012 and Q4 2011 to finish at $474 million, which T-Mobile says is due to the popularity of its Monthly4G plans.
T-Mobile also touched a bit on its handset sales for the fourth quarter. The operator says that it moved 2.8 million 3G/4G smartphones during the quarter, an increase from 2.3 million in the previous quarter and 2.6 million year over year. Smartphones accounted for 79 percent of handsets sold at T-Mobile during Q4 2012, with the Samsung Galaxy S III in particular producing strong sales figures. T-Mo also notes that it's currently activating around 100,000 iPhones on its network each month, with the total number of iPhone users currently on Magenta sitting at over 2 million. T-Mobile previously announced that it's agreed to officially begin selling unnamed Apple products in 2013.
Overall it looks like T-Mobile had a bit of a mixed fourth quarter. It lost quite a few postpaid subscribers and had fewer prepaid additions than in previous quarters, but overall it actually saw an increase in net customers in Q4 2012. The carrier is looking for things to pick up in the future, with its MetroPCS merger expected to close in the first half of 2013, its agreement to sell Apple products kicking off this year and its 4G LTE launch going live soon. T-Mobile says that its LTE networks in Las Vegas and Kansas City are completed, but it doesn't currently offer any LTE-capable equipment for use with them. Magenta has certainly had a bit of a rough go recently, and it'll be interesting to see if things like LTE and the launch of Apple devices can help it to make this year a better one. T-Mobile's full Q4 2012 results can be found at the links below.
Via T-Mobile: Summary of Q4 2012, Full Q4 2012 report (PDF)