Canadian Rogers Wireless - the country’s largest carrier - increased subscriber count in the 4th quarter by just below 200,000 new subscribers - a positive growth compared to the previous year despite depreciating economic conditions.

The lack of competition in the Canadian wireless phone market - particularly in the GSM sector, of which Rogers is the only remaining competitor - assures the company monopoly profits despite more-than-equilibriac rates for telephone services.

“Our wireless subscriber results reflect our success in driving greater penetration of more advanced wireless data devices and services,” said acting CEO, Alan Horn.

50,000 of the new subscribers were buyers of Apple’s iPhone device, a recent addition to the Canadian telephone market, and a monopoly guaranteed by Apple to Rogers customers only.

Rogers sold 130,000 iPhones total in Q4 - the remaining of which were sold to existing subscribers.

Despite the positive net growth, Rogers says that these numbers are hugely dampened by a weakened economy, with well over 250,000 new iPhone-specific accounts activated in the earlier months of the year, adding “the pace of iPhones sold fell to 10,000 per week and the drop from Q3 was more than expected.”

The Canadian Press quotes an industry analyst from Genuine Capital Markets as saying that sales were surprisingly weak.

“While the iPhone was less of a new product in (the fourth quarter), we assumed that iPhone net additions would be in line with the third quarter because of the Christmas period and the fact that Bell and Telus faced BlackBerry Storm availability issues.”

Full Q4 financial data for Rogers Wireless becomes available to the public on February 18th.

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