First came Verizon, then AT&T, and then Sprint. Now it’s T-Mobile’s turn to reveal its quarterly earnings and round out the big four’s announcements.
T-Mobile reports that it added 2.1 million total net customers in the fourth quarter of 2014, including 1.3 million branded postpaid adds and 266,000 prepaid adds. Adding up all of T-Mobile’s customer adds for 2014 gives us a grand total of 8.3 million net additions. At the end of Q4 2014, T-Mobile had 55.018 million customers.
T-Mo’s churn for Q4 2014 finished at 1.7 percent. Churn is the percent of customers that left T-Mobile compared to the average number of customers on the carrier during the quarter.
On the LTE side of things, T-Mobile says that its LTE network covered 265 million people at the end of 2014, which beats T-Mo’s goal of 250 million. T-Mobile hopes to cover 300 million people with LTE by the end of 2015. T-Mobile’s Wideband LTE was available in 121 markets at the end of 2014, and T-Mo hopes to expand to 150 by the end of 2015. Finally, T-Mobile’s 700MHz A-Block spectrum covered 190 million people at the end of 2014.
T-Mobile also gave an update on its prepaid MetroPCS business. At the end of 2014, MetroPCS was available in 55 markets and had almost 11,000 points of sale. Eighty-seven percent of Metro’s customer base had switched over to T-Mobile’s network at the end of 2014, and around 73 percent of Metro’s spectrum had been refarmed and integrated into T-Mobile’s network.
Finally, T-Mobile reports that it pulled in $8.15 billion in Q4 2014, up from $6.83 billion in the year-ago quarter. Service revenues also grew year-over-year to finish at $5.87 billion at the end of Q4 2014.
Overall it looks like T-Mobile had itself a pretty nice fourth quarter and entire 2014. Not only did T-Mo exceed its LTE rollout goals, it expanded its Wideband LTE and 700MHz A-Block to increase its data speeds and coverage. And while T-Mo didn’t quite catch Sprint in total subscriber numbers, it did cut the difference between the two to less than 1 million subs.
T-Mobile will hold a conference call to discuss its Q4 2014 results at 9:00 am ET. I’ll be sure to update you with any noteworthy info that’s shared during the call.