AT&T Q1 earnings are out, $600 million gone because of COVID-19

While we’re staying at home, using our phones more than ever, according to some statistics, some carriers aren’t having the jolly time we think they do.

AT&T just released its earnings for the first quarter of 2020 and the results are a mixed bag. The company missed its revenue target by $1.4 billion and compared to last year’s Q1, revenue is down 4.6%. At the same time, earnings have gone up 14.1% YoY, reaching $4.69 billion.

AT&T estimates that the impact of COVID-19 was about $600 million of missing revenue and without it, the overall change would have been only -3.2%.

Those numbers include all of AT&T’s businesses, when we look into the breakdown, we see that wireless service revenue was actually up 2.5%, but most other branches were down, including WarnerMedia, which lost 12.2% in revenue YoY. With movies and TV show production stopped and cinemas closed, there’s no real surprise there.

AT&T lost almost a million premium video subscribers during Q1, or 897,000 to be exact, not a great result during times when people mostly rely on their TVs for entertainment.

On the carrier side, things were more promising, AT&T gained 163,000 postpaid subscribers, overachieving, according to analysts that were expecting the number to be around 90,000. 43,000 of its prepaid subscribers went bye-bye, however, so the net user gain is 120,000.

When it comes to Q2, executives would rather not talk about it right now. AT&T withdrew its Q2 guidance, stating that with the current situation it’s impossible to predict what the results of the next quarter will be.

We can’t argue with that, July 2020 will bring us some interesting numbers, not only from carriers but from phone manufacturers as well.