Add to del.icio.us     Digg this

Apr. 22, 2010

Overall, AT&T Mobility posted 1st quarter financial results showing an increased dependency on non-traditional wireless devices as well as a considerable slowing down of lucrative postpaid net customer additions.

However, for its first fiscal quarter, AT&T Mobility said it added 1.9 million net activations to its network, which was well ahead of the 1.5 million expected by analysts, ending the quarter with nearly 87 million new customers.

AT&T said it added 512,000 direct postpaid mobile customers during Q1, which was inline with estimates, but a substantial drop from the 875,000 direct postpaid customer additions the wireless carrier reported during the first quarter of last year and the more than 900,000 it added during the final three months of 2009.

Helping to increase its customer growth for the quarter was a drop in customer churn rates from 1.5 percent during the first quarter of last year to about 1.3 percent this year.

Postpaid churn rates also dropped from 1.15 percent last year to a little over 1 percent this year.

Overall, the growth was boosted by strong adoption of connected devices, including e-readers, GPS devices and alarm monitoring systems, which the wireless carrier said accounted for 1.1 million net adds during the quarter and totaled 5.8 million devices.

AT&T Mobility reported total revenues, including device sales, increased more than 8 percent year-over-year to $13.9 billion, while income was up almost 21 percent to $4.17 billion.

AT&T's wireless division accounted for close to 46 percent of the company's total revenues for the quarter.

AT&T Mobility did note however that about 46 percent of its 65 million postpaid customers had a wireless device that included a real or virtual QWERTY keyboard, an increase from 32 percent at the end of the first quarter of last year.

Still, Apple's iPhone continues to be a hot item at the wireless carrier with more than 2.68 million activations on its network during the quarter compared with just 1.6 million during the first quarter of last year, though down from the 3.1 million activated during the fourth quarter of 2009.

AT&T Mobility noted that one-third of the iPhones activated were from customers new to the wireless carrier.

That strong device growth helped pushed postpaid ARPU (average revenue per user) up almost 4.1 percent year-over-year to $61.9, with postpaid data ARPU increasing almost 21.9 percent to $20.13.

Total data revenues grew almost 30 percent year-over-year to $4.1 billion or almost 31.9 percent of the company's $12.85 billion in total wireless revenues during the quarter.

AT&T's rival Verizon Wireless is scheduled to release first quarter results later today.

Some wireless industry analysts think Verizon's results could be slightly better than AT&T's.

Add to del.icio.us     Digg this

Source: AT&T Mobility.