AT&T has just announced earnings for the first quarter of the year, which is headlined with consolidated revenues of $38 billion for the quarter. Cash from operations totaled $8.9 billion, capital expenditures were $6.1 billion and free cash flow was $2.8 billion. That translates to a diluted EPS or Earnings Per Share of $0.75 as reported, and adjusted to $0.85. This is up from $0.56 and $0.74 respectively year-over-year. AT&T actually missed analysts expectations here, EPS of $0.87 were expected, with revenues of $39.31 billion for the quarter. So the carrier just narrowly missed analysts expectations here.
The carrier posted a total of 3.2 million net adds for the quarter, with 2.6 million in the US and 543,000 in Mexico. In the US, AT&T is touting that it had “strong year-over-year improvements” in postpaid phone net adds, but did not mention the number of net adds there. On the prepaid side, it did post 192,000 phone net adds, and 500,000 branded smartphones added to its base. Finally, it is touting its best-ever first quarter postpaid phone churn of 0.84%. That’s pretty good, and means that AT&T is gaining customers and keeping them. On the entertainment side of things, AT&T announced that there were 312,000 DIRECTV NOW net adds in the quarter, which brings the total to 1.5 million subscribers on its cord cutting service. There were 125,000 total video net adds with DIRECTV NOW, which has helped stabilize the video customer base since it purchased DIRECTV in 2014. Finally, on the internet side of things, there were 154,000 IP broadband net adds, and 82,000 total broadband net adds. AT&T also announced that there are more than eight million customer locations with fiber now.
AT&T did not provide further guidance for the year, but it did state that it is inline with the guidance it had put out already. Revenue was down about 1.1-percent year-over-year, but that’s not a huge issue for AT&T, and likely something that will pick up as we get further into 2018. DIRECTV NOW is also continuing to grow for the company, bringing the total to 1.5 million, which isn’t bad for a service that is just over a year old. But AT&T did miss analyst expectations here, and thus the stock has begun to drop in after hours trading. Currently down around 4%, and still continuing to drop.