After offering a tease of its first quarter 2013 results in early April, T-Mobile today released its full Q1 2013 report. The magenta operator reiterated this morning that it gained 3,000 branded customers in the quarter, which it says is its first branded customer growth since 2009 in the quarter. That number is a result of T-Mobile losing 199,000 postpaid customers (a 61 percent year-over-year improvement) while gaining 202,000 prepaid subscribers. In total, T-Mobile gained 579,000 customers in Q1 2013. T-Mobile ended the quarter with approximately 34 million customers.
Several major changes took place at T-Mobile during the first few months, such as the launch of its Simple Choice plans and the run-up to its merger with MetroPCS. Another happening that T-Mobile customers had been looking forward to was the official launch of the iPhone. As part of its announcement, T-Mobile shed some light on how well the iPhone 5 has been selling since its launch on April 12, revealing that new and existing customers have snapped up around 500,000 iPhone 5s. T-Mobile says that its customers also brought an additional 100,000 iPhones onto its network in the quarter.
On the financial side of things, T-Mobile reports that it earned total revenues of $4.677 billion for the first quarter of 2013, a number that's down slightly from its $4.9 billion in revenue from Q4 2012 and $5.0 billion in Q1 2012. The carrier's net income for Q1 2013 finished at $107 million.
The first few months of 2013 were big for T-Mobile. During that time, Big Magenta continued working on its merger with MetroPCS, launched its Simple Choice plans, began selling the iPhone and launched its 4G LTE network in seven markets. While the first quarter may have brought with it some decreased revenues as well, it appears that T-Mobile had itself a pretty decent quarter overall thanks to its branded customer growth and sales of half a million iPhones in three weeks.
What will be interesting to watch is how consumers react to all of the carrier's big changes going forward. After all, its Simple Choice plans have only been available for a couple of months at this point, and its LTE network has launched in just seven cities. Unfortunately, we'll have to wait until T-Mobile reports its Q2 2013 numbers before we get some insight on that matter. If you'd like to dive deeper into T-Mo's Q1 2013 stats in the mean time, you can find them at the link below.
Via T-Mobile
