AT&T has just published their fourth quarter of 2015 earnings and the company did pretty well. Adding 2.8 million new wireless connections in the quarter. The company also brought in $42.1 billion in revenue. Which is a 22% increase over the fourth quarter of 2014. AT&T says that is primarily due to acquiring DirecTV. Speaking of DirecTV, they added 214,000 customers. And AT&T added 192,000 total IP Broadband customers in the quarter.
Of the 2.8 million net adds for the quarter, it breaks down as 1.6 million branded net adds (that’s both prepaid and postpaid), 2.2 million US Wireless net adds with postpaid churn of 1.18% and a total churn of 1.50%. Both of which are down over a year ago. AT&T also added 638,000 connections in Mexico. AT&T is also touting that their 4G LTE coverage has expanded to cover over 355 million users. About 696,000 adds for the quarter were tablets and other connected devices.
For the full year of 2015, AT&T’s consolidated revenues were $146.8 billion, compared to $132.4 billion the year before. That’s a 10.8% increase. Operating expenses were $122 billion, compared to $120.2 billion the year prior which makes it a 1.5% increase. While net income that was attributable to AT&T was $13.3 billion compared to $6.4 billion in 2015. While the company is seeing increases in every area, the company did lose a bit in the wireless industry. Dropping to $18.9 billion, which is a 4.9% drop year-over-year. AT&T is blaming this on lower equipment sales. Revenue from wireless service also dropped about 1.7% year-over-year.
Not an all around positive quarter for AT&T, but they could have certainly did worse. Some areas they’ll need to improve on, like increasing their revenue from wireless, which is something investors will want. Seeing them add 2.8 million connections in the quarter is a pretty big step, although around half of those connections were cars thanks to their deals with GM, Ford, Audi and a few other car makers. Seeing DirecTV account for about 30% of the revenue for the company is pretty impressive as well. After all, AT&T only closed that deal a few months ago. AT&T’s CEO, Randall Stephenson also hinted at the company launching their own video service again, during the quarterly earnings. Something we’ve been expecting for a few months now following Verizon’s Go90 launch.