It’s earnings week, in case you couldn’t tell. And this time it’s AT&T’s turn. After Verizon added just north of 1 million net customers in Q2, and T-Mobile says they added around 2.1M (unofficially, by the way), AT&T is here to announce that they have matched T-Mobile’s net adds with 2.1M new wireless customers. AT&T’s churn rate took a drop, went to 1.01, which was previously 1.02 last quarter and 1.22 a year ago.
Now let’s talk cash, AT&T racked in $33.02 billion in revenue. Earnings per share of about $0.69. That’s about where Wall Street expected the second largest carrier to be in Q2. Wall Street expected revenue of $33.06 billion and $0.63 per share. Their net adds break down like this, 410,000 postpaid subscribers, 331,000 prepaid subscribers and 1 million connected cars. AT&T added 1.2 million smartphones to their network (we’re aware that 410,000 + 331,000 does not equal 1.2 million. The remaining amount is all business customers and such). Not a bad quarter by any means for AT&T.
Average Revenue Per User or ARPU, also grew 6.1-percent year-over-year and 3.1-percent compared to Q1 2015. This is thanks to the AT&T Next monthly payments growing. With more and more users switching over to AT&T Next for their next smartphone.
AT&T has also been touting that they have mostly made the move to unsubsidized smartphones. Meaning less than a quarter of their customers are still signing 2-year contracts. The remaining three-quarters are all on AT&T Next or just buying their smartphones out right. AT&T also stated that about 96-percent of their customers are on a business plan, family plan or a shared data plan. That means about 4% is still on their grandfathered unlimited plan.
Last quarter, AT&T added 1.2 million wireless connections. With 684,000 of those being connected cars. With the company adding 1 million connected cars to their network this quarter, it’s clear that those exclusivities for 4G LTE with GM is really helping out AT&T. Their postpaid numbers have been mostly the same comparing Q1 and Q2 2015 to each other.
On the other side of AT&T, is their Wireline. Which includes internet and TV. The company states that U-Verse consumer revenues were $4.1 billion with an adjusted growth of 19.2-percent year over year. AT&T’s CEO, Randall Stephenson stated that they “look forward to closing DirecTV and building on this momentum”. We heard earlier this week that it appears the merger between AT&T and DirecTV have the green light to be approved.