AT&T third quarter financials highlight wireless subscribers adds, record-low churn, but missed earnings targets

The company added more than 2 million wireless and wireline connections in the third quarter. Of that, 785,000 were post-paid net wireless subscriber additions.

America’s second largest carrier also posted record low churn of just 0.99%, which accompanied 5% higher wireless revenues, and a 24% increase in wireless data billing. AT&T’s Mobile Share wireless plan gained significantly, with 47 million connections, more than half are on data plans with 10GB or more. With those adds, post-paid average revenue per user (ARPU) increased marginally as a whole.

91% of all postpaid phone sales were smartphones, and half of those were additions or upgrades using AT&T Next with no device subsidy. Other data products were up as well, with AT&T adding more than 600,000 U-Verse internet customers.

Much of that business came at a cost however, as AT&T has marketed a number of aggressive incentives to entice customers to switch service or upgrade. Posted per-share earnings missed by a penny, $0.63 versus an expected $0.64 on $33.2 billion in revenue.

AT&T’s results are a mixed bag compared to Verizon’s recently posted results. AT&T added more lines and had much lower churn than Big Red, but Verizon was able to keep Wall Street a bit more satiated with its financials.

The company we are eagerly awaiting numbers from are for T-Mobile, whom we already know whose month of August eclipsed either AT&T's and Verizon's for the whole quarter. Those results will be posted on October 28th.

source: AT&T