Shares of AT&T spiked 2 percent in after-hours trading Thursday as the company’s third-quarter earnings beat analyst expectations in its first quarterly report since acquiring DirecTV.
Overall, AT&T marked down $39.1 billion in consolidated revenues, even as DirecTV’s earnings didn’t count towards AT&T’s numbers until July 25th.
In an afternoon earnings call, CFO John Stephens noted that total revenues would have tallied $41.2 billion had DirecTV contributed for the full quarter.
Including merger-related expenses, Leap network decommissioning and other one-time costs, AT&T managed $0.50 diluted earnings per share (EPS) compared to $0.60 diluted EPS in the year-ago quarter. Excluding those items, diluted EPS was $0.74 versus $0.65 a year ago, up nearly 14 percent annually.
On the mobility side of the business, wireless revenues remained flat at $18.3 billion, but margins grew 5 percent from 43.1 percent to 49.4 percent year over year.
Meanwhile Average Revenue Per Account (ARPU) was up markedly, rising from $68.29 to $68.82 sequentially.
AT&T counted 289,000 net postpaid wireless additions and 466,000 prepaid net additions. That was the best quarterly prepaid numbers the carrier had reported in nearly 8 years. Postpaid churn ticked up from .99 percent in the third quarter last year to 1.16 percent.
Stephens attributed the bump in churn to the loss of feature phone customers who don’t want to pay the higher price for a smartphone and data plan.
“That’s part of a decision we made not to chase those customers,” Stephens said, noting that he didn’t see much in the way of involuntary churn from the company’s core high-value postpaid customers. “Our base of feature phones continues to get smaller and over time this will lessen the impact it has on our churn. It appears to us…that some of the other carriers are not taking the same approach and they’re focused more on customer counts than they are on the actual profitability of the customer.”
AT&T raised its guidance for the year. The company increased its adjusted EPS and free cash flow outlook for the year. AT&T now expects adjusted EPS in the $2.68 to $2.74 range and free cash flow in the $15 billion range or better.
Shares of AT&T were trading at $33.96 Thursday as of 5:26 p.m. EST.