Today, T-Mobile has put out their Q4 2014 earnings numbers, at least their preliminary ones. These might change slightly over the month, but likely not a drastic change. In 2014, they added over 8 million (8.3 million to be exact) customers over the four quarters. Pretty amazing, right? Especially for a company that was losing close to a million customers a quarter the year before. With that addition, T-Mobile is temporarily #3 in the US. I say temporarily because Sprint has not released their Q4 numbers yet. So we are looking at Sprint’s most recent tally of 54.8 million in Q3 2014, vs T-Mobile’s in Q4 2014.
Here’s a look at T-Mobile’s 2014: 8.3 million total net customer additions, 4.9 million branded postpaid net customer additions, 4.0 million branded postpaid phone net customer additions, and 265 million people now covered by the nation’s fastest 4G LTE network. Not bad for a carrier that was failing pretty miserably just a short time ago. Obviously tablets were a big deal this year, not just for T-Mobile though (Verizon and AT&T also posted high numbers for tablets in 2014).
So what about the fourth quarter? T-Mobile added 2.1 million total net customer additions, 1.3 million branded postpaid net customer additions, 1.0 million branded postpaid phone net customer additions, and 266,000 branded prepaid net customer additions. Not their strongest quarter, but 2.1 million net customer additions is still nothing to sneeze at. Especially when you’re the fourth largest carrier, and that’s a number that the largest carrier – Verizon – usually throws up.
“We continued to take share from our competitors and attracted 8.3 million net customers in 2014 who were looking for value, simplicity and transparency,” said John Legere, President and CEO of T-Mobile. “While my competitors are hiding behind less valuable connected device subscriber additions and managing profit expectations to the downside, T-Mobile delivered over 2.1 million customers in Q4, while managing the balance between growth and profitability. Needless to say, 2014 was a record breaking year.”
While it seems like Legere is running out of ideas for the Uncarrier movements, I don’t know if anything else needs to be done. Customers are coming in droves now, the biggest thing T-Mobile needs to work on is coverage. And I can honestly say they are working on that. I’m getting signal in places I used to get nothing from T-Mobile just a year ago. Not to mention blazing speeds. At home I usually get 0-1 bars of LTE, and can still pull down a solid 10mbps. Not bad at all. So here’s to a great 2015 for T-Mobile.