This morning we posted T-Mobile’s Q2 earnings, which were quite good. They brought in around $391 million in operating profit, and added 1.5 million new connections in April, May and June. Which marks the fifth consecutive quarter that T-Mobile has added over a million new connections. And brought them past the 50 million subscriber mark. After they put out the press release (around 6am ET this morning) they did their conference call a bit later on. Which there were some interesting quotes from the executives at T-Mobile. The most interesting one was regarding the T-Mobile/Sprint Merger from CEO John Legere.
While Legere can’t comment specifically on the merger – likely due to some NDA’s etc, from the lawyers on both sides – what he did say about it was basically that they don’t need to merge with Sprint to succeed. And I think we’re beginning to see that. After the Q1 results where they lost around $180 million but gained 2.4 million subscribers, many were saying that T-Mobile needs Sprint. But if T-Mobile can keep this up, that may not be true. T-Mobile is still about half of what AT&T and Verizon are, in terms of subscribers, but they may soon pass up Sprint. T-Mobile currently has 50.5 million customers and Sprint is sitting at just over 53 million. While AT&T and Verizon are over 100 million.
Another topic that T-Mobile touched on was the new iPhone which is due to come out in the fall, with a larger screen. Legere also wouldn’t comment on the iPhone 6, again he’s likely under NDAs from Apple. But there was a study that came out recently saying that 33% of wannabe-carrier switchers would join Magenta, and not many would leave Magenta. But the iPhone 6 and the new iPad coming this fall could definitely bring over a ton of new subscribers to T-Mobile.
There’s a lot to be proud of, if you’re John Legere. Not just from this quarter but from the entire time he’s been CEO of T-Mobile. Since taking over, T-Mobile has gone from losing around a million subscribers each quarter to adding just that many. They are actually in a better place now then they were before AT&T tried to purchase them. Which led to a huge exodus of subscribers, and now they’ve built it back up to where they need to be. However, T-Mobile’s not done, as Legere did tease uncarrier 7.0 for later this summer, today.
