Yep, you read that right. Despite having a record breaking 2.1 million subscribers for Big Red in Q4 2012, totaling over 98 million customers, Verizon posted a $4.23 billion loss. Now, losing a few billion dollars is never a good thing, of course, but Verizon is a postpaid wireless carrier, so most of their profit comes over the two-year contracts customers sign to purchase their heavily subsidized phones, so this is certainly not the end of the world for them. And the best part of this report is that we get a peek at smartphone trends.
Verizon’s subscriber base is now 58% smartphone users, up from 53%, and 87% of their 9.8 million sales in Q4 were smartphones. How many of those were LTE phones, you may be wondering? Right around 7.3 million, putting LTE devices in the hands of 23% of its customers, which is great news for LTE adoption. (hopefully we’ll see some other carriers pick up the pace and follow suit) Now, unfortunately for our little green friend, only 3.6 million of those 9.8 million phones were running Android, which coincides with some of that market share turmoil we’ve seen in the past few months. Android is still doing just fine worldwide, anyway.
source: The Verge