AT&T’s reported Q4 2016 revenue was $41.8 billion, as the US’ second-largest wireless carrier announced their fourth quarter and full-year results today. AT&T states that they were able to see a fairly healthy growth of subscribers throughout the year in addition to their positive revenue figures, as they add 9.5 million new wireless net adds in 2016, while a total of 2.8 million of those wireless net adds were from just the fourth quarter of the year. Of the Q4 results, 1.5 million net adds were U.S.-based subscribers while the remaining 1.3 million net adds were from Mexico-based subscribers. For the full year, these totals amounted to 6.2 million and 3.3 million respectively.
As for consolidated revenue, as stated above AT&T reported $41.8 billion in consolidated revenue for the fourth quarter while their operating income ended at $4.2 billion. For the entire year this translated to $163.8 billion in consolidated revenue and $24.3 billion in operating income. While the largest amount of new subscribers did not come from AT&T’s new service, DIRECTV NOW, AT&T does note that it had a rather strong and successful launch, as the carrier was able to sign up more than 200,000 paid net adds for the new streaming TV service, which they initially reported back on January 20th while also highlighting that this was just for the first month. In addition to DIRECTV NOW, AT&T also added a total of 235,000 U.S.-based DIRECTV Satellite adds for the year, 149,000 new customers with broadband internet, and nearly 400 million 4G LTE POPs across North America.
AT&T’s net income for the fourth quarter was $2.4 billion while that amount was reported at a total of $13 billion for the entire year, and they have a free cash flow of $3.7 billion for the fourth quarter which is an increase of about 19.2%, while the same results for the year are $16.9 billion which is an increase of 6.8%. AT&T notes that they also added 1.1 million branded smartphones to their subscriber base in the fourth quarter and they had their best postpaid phone churn at 0.98%, which means they basically retained a fair amount of customers who activated. Wireless postpaid churn was slightly higher than this as it was reported at 1.16%. While they seem to have had a decent year in 2016, AT&T is already looking to have an even better year in 2017, as the company expects to see an increase, albeit a small one, in consolidated revenue growth stating that they expect the increase to be in the low single digits. They also expect growth for adjusted EPS to be in the mid-single digit range while free cash flow is expected to sit at about $18 billion.