T-Mobile, America’s third largest wireless carrier, has announced that it has outpaced the growth of its competitors in the fourth quarter of last year. According to the company’s quarterly earnings report released on Wednesday, the Un-carrier has seen net subscriber adds of 2.1 million in the last quarter of 2015 alone, with the full-year number being 8.3 million. While that number includes prepaid along with postpaid connections, the company says that in postpaid alone, it has seen as many as 1.3 million new customers joining the T-Mobile fold, with 1.3 million of them coming in the final three months of last year. What must be just as pleasing to the CEO, Mr. John Legere and his team, is that branded postpaid churn fell 27 basis points YoY to just 1.46 percent during the quarter.
T-Mobile further says that the last three months of 2015 represents the eleventh consecutive quarter the company added over a million net subscribers, and the year itself was the second one in a row which apparently saw the company adding more than 8 million net subscribers overall. What all these impressive numbers meant for the bottom-line of the company is that its service revenue saw a growth of 11 percent during the quarter, resulting in a 31 percent growth in adjusted EBITDA (Earnings Before Interest, Tax and Depreciation). The company claims a total subscriber base of 63 million as of December 31, 2015, which keeps the company firmly planted at the number three spot on the list of America’s largest wireless carriers behind Verizon and AT&T, but it is already starting to pull away from Sprint, which remains at number four.
In monetary terms, T-Mobile reported a net income of $297 million in Q4, 2015 on adjusted EBITDA of $2.3 billion. As for the whole year, the company says that its net income stood at and $733 million on adjusted EBITDA of $7.4 billion last year. Postpaid ARPU also remained “stable” at $48.05 during the final quarter of last year, as per the announcement from the company. As for next year, T-Mobile says that it is targeting net adds of between 2.4 million to 3.4 million branded postpaid customers, and an adjusted EBITDA of between $9.1 to $9.7 billion. Buoyed by the strong showing, Mr. John Legere sounded characteristically outspoken when he announced – “We set out to change this industry, we’re well on our way and we won’t stop”.