The second quarter of the year just ended a couple of weeks ago, so none of the wireless companies have announced their earnings yet for the quarter, but that hasn’t stopped analysts, like those at Wells Fargo Securities from speculating about how well T-Mobile and others have done. While it was expected that tower companies did well in the quarter, Wells Fargo Securities analyst Jennifer Fritszche believes that T-Mobile did well in an “uneventful” quarter.
Fritszche noted about Sprint’s recent year free of service deal is not expected “to meaningfully impact print’s share of FQ1 gross adds in a material way.” Since this promotion was only available online, and Sprint did not really promote it that much. Fritszche also noted that Sprint is likely to post around 60,000 postpaid net phone users in the quarter. Verizon and AT&T aren’t expected to see any big changes either, with AT&T slated to lose around 275,000 customers in the quarter, and Verizon is expecting a 7% year-over-year drop, according to Fritszche.
When it comes to T-Mobile, Fritzsche believes that it was another big quarter for the magenta carrier. Noting that its “Un-carrier” strategy is still paying off for the company. Now, T-Mobile has said that it expects a “fairly significant decline” in its prepaid business, and this is due to T-Mobile not wanting to counter other rivals with prices as of late. Fritzsche did add that T-Mobile ONE is still seeing strong adoption, compared to its competitors. Wells Fargo Securities is estimating Q2 postpaid net adds of around 726,000, with net postpaid phone adds of 602,000 for the quarter. T-Mobile will be holding its quarterly earnings call next week, on July 19th, so we’ll definitely know more then. But as for now, it is looking pretty good for T-Mobile, even in a historically slow quarter. The first quarter is usually the slowest, after a huge fourth quarter. But the second quarter does see a few new smartphone launches – like the Galaxy S8, LG G6 and HTC U11 this time around – so it’ll be interesting to see how the Un-carrier faired this time around. T-Mobile hasn’t added less than 1 million net adds in over 3 years now.