AT&T has released its fourth quarter of 2012 results, and smartphones are ruling the roost.
The latest results from AT&T show that the company sold 10.2 million smartphones for the quarter, the most ever sold by any U.S. carrier. This number represented 89 percent of postpaid phone sales, and 69.6 percent of its postpaid subscribers now have have smartphones, or 47.1 million. This is an increase from the same quarter in 2011 that saw smartphones representing 58.5 percent, or 39.4 million.
AT&T added a total of 780,000 postpaid subscribers, and was its best quarter in three years.
For the quarter AT&T saw a record 8.6 million iPhones activated, and 16 percent of those were new to the carrier. While it did not provide exact numbers, it said that it had its best-ever sales quarter for Android handsets.
The U-Verse Internet and television service added 192,000 for the latter while 609,000 signed up for Internet access.
Despite adding all of these new customers, AT&T posted a net loss of $3.8 billion, or 68 cents per share off of revenue of $32.6 billion. This is an improvement over the same quarter a year ago where the company posted a net loss of $6.7 billion, or $1.12 a share off of revenue of $32.5 billion. Obviously the company is getting its expenses under control.
