T-Mobile’s pressure on wireless rivals AT&T, Sprint and Verizon continued to pay off in the third quarter, helping the Un-carrier lock in 851,000 branded postpaid phone net additions.
T-Mobile said it also pulled in 684,000 branded prepaid net additions in the same period, more than doubling the 304,000 prepaid subscriber additions reported by AT&T in the quarter. T-Mobile said the gains marked its 13th consecutive quarter of both pre- and postpaid growth. The figures were up from 646,000 postpaid phone net additions and 476,000 branded prepaid net additions in T-Mobile’s second quarter.
T-Mobile also said 80 percent of new postpaid phone customers are opting for its recently launched T-Mobile One unlimited offering.
The Un-carrier said total net additions for the quarter stood at 1.97 million, for a total of 69.4 million connections.
T-Mobile previously bragged the majority of its customer additions came from rival carriers, including 250,000 postpaid phone and prepaid net customers from Verizon, 300,000 customers from Sprint and nearly 400,000 customers from AT&T. The Un-carrier said at the time it also continued to see “strong flows” of first-time customers coming to the market.
Other key metrics from the Un-carrier’s third quarter included a 17.8 percent bump in total revenue to $.92 billion and a 165 percent leap in net income to $366 million. Churn of 1.32 percent in the third quarter was up slightly from the previous quarter but down from 1.46 percent the year prior. T-Mobile’s upgrade rate for branded postpaid customers was around 7 percent, down from 9 percent the year prior but up from 6 percent in the previous quarter.
Branded postpaid average revenue per user (ARPU) was up 2.2. percent sequentially to $48.15 and stable year over year. ARPU including device payments was up 42 cents to $63.38 in the quarter, T-Mobile said.
T-Mobile said capital expenses for the quarter were more than $1.1 billion.
T-Mobile stock on Monday jumped more than 7 percent on the news.
Up against the competition
The Un-carrier’s results compared more than favorably with those of its fellow U.S. wireless carriers.
Last week, Verizon said it lost 36,000 net postpaid phone subscribers but pulled in a total of 442,000 retail postpaid net additions in the third quarter. Verizon’s wireless revenue also declined 3.9 percent to $22.1 billion.
Just before T-Mobile’s Monday morning report, AT&T said it lost 268,000 postpaid handsets but made overall postpaid gains of 212,000 net additions. AT&T also reported 304,000 prepaid net additions for the third quarter.
Though Sprint isn’t formally reporting its third quarter results until tomorrow, the carrier last week teased 344,000 net postpaid additions, 347,000 net postpaid phone additions and revenue growth of three percent year over year to $8.25 billion.
Other Metrics
As of the close of the third quarter, T-Mobile said its low-band spectrum holdings covered 260 million POPs, a figure that is expected to rise to 272 million in the fourth quarter as the carrier closes on previously announced transactions.
As of the end of the third quarter, T-Mobile said it owned or had agreements to own an average of 85 MHz of spectrum across the top 25 U.S. markets.
T-Mobile said Voice-over-LTE (VoLTE) carried around 61 percent of total voice calls in the third quarter, up from 16 percent a year ago. The Un-carrier said carrier aggregation is not live for customers in 535 cities, while 4×4 MIMO is live in 319 cities. By the end of this month, T-Mobile said 256 QAM will be extended to nearly every cell site in its network.
The Un-carrier refined its full year guidance to include 3.7 million to 3.9 million branded postpaid phone net additions – up from 3.4 million to 3.8 million – and boosted EBITDA predictions from $9.8 billion to $10.1 billion to $10.2 billion to $10.4 billion.
