Tuesday, January 28, 2014

AT&T Q4 2013 earnings are in: $18.4 billion wireless revenue, 566,000 customer adds

Postpaid churn of just 1.11%; data revenues up by 16% over Q4 2012

AT&T has just reported its Q4 2013 financial results, and the company as a whole posted $33.2 billion in revenues in Q4, which is up 1.8 percent over last year, and $6.91 billion in net income. We like to focus on the wireless side of things, however, which are more relevant to the Android world.

For its wireless business, AT&T saw operating revenues increase by 4.5 percent year-over-year to $18.44 billion, with a 16 percent bump in data revenues making up a large portion of that growth. Net income still dipped in the quarter, however, due to high expenses — the end result was $3.92 billion in income, down 14.7 percent over Q3 2013 but up 54 percent over Q4 2012.

AT&T still managed to add a total of 556,000 net postpaid customers in the quarter, as well as 440,000 branded net tablet additions. That leaves the carrier with a total of 110.37 million customers, 72.6 million of which are postpaid. The carrier had record-low Q4 churn of 1.11 percent, although it was still several basis points above previous quarters in 2013. Phone-only ARPU was up 3.9 percent year-over-year as well, marking the 20th consecutive quarter that ARPU has increased.

Of the 7.9 million phones sold in the quarter, 93 percent were smartphones. AT&T also says its Next financing program was used for over one million device sales, equivalent to 15 percent of all postpaid smartphone additions and upgrades. A full 77 percent of AT&T's postpaid customers are using smartphones, up from 70 percent in Q4 2012.

Source: AT&T