T-Mobile Gains 891,000 Branded Postpaid Customers in Fourth Quarter
January 09 2018 - 9:33AM
Dow Jones News
By Austen Hufford
T-Mobile US Inc. (TMUS) continued to see subscriber growth as
the launch of Apple Inc.'s (AAPL) latest iPhone likely encouraged
some people to buy new plans.
T-Mobile reported a net gain of 891,000 branded postpaid
accounts in the fourth quarter, bringing it to end the year with
38.04 million postpaid accounts.
T-Mobile said it ended the quarter with 72.59 million total
customer accounts, which also includes customers who buy data and
minutes before use on the company's MetroPCS brand and wholesale
customers.
Apple released its iPhone X in early November with a starting
price of $999 and features like an edge-to-edge display and a
face-recognition unlocking system.
In November Sprint Corp. (S) and T-Mobile called off their
merger plans, ending months of talks about a tie-up.
Competing with larger rivals, like Verizon(VZ) and AT&T (T),
T-Mobile has also promoted its unlimited data plans, which include
international data roaming in many countries. Last February Verizon
brought back its own unlimited data plans.
T-Mobile said its churn rate for its postpaid accounts, a
measure of how many customers didn't re-subscribe to its service,
fell to 1.18% from 1.28% in the same quarter last year.
In all for the quarter, T-Mobile added 1.1 million total
postpaid customers, down from 1.74 million in the same quarter last
year. The reading was up from 1.04 million in the third
quarter.
The carrier said in December that it is acquiring a
streaming-video startup and will launch its own paid-television
service, becoming the latest company to jump into the increasingly
crowded online-video market. The company has also been running a
promotion that gives some new unlimited subscribers Netflix
accounts.
The company also said that it had bought about $444 million
worth of its own shares through a repurchase program and still had
$1.1 billion remaining in the authorization as of Dec. 31.
T-Mobile also said that its majority shareholder, Deutsche
Telekom AG (DTEGY), is considering plans to purchase additional
shares of the company, which it said would likely take place this
year.
Write to Austen Hufford at Austen.Hufford@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
January 09, 2018 09:18 ET (14:18 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2018 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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