Less than a week after Verizon shared its Q4 2014 earnings report, AT&T has given us its own figures to compare.
AT&T added 1.9 million wireless subscribers in Q4 2014, a number that includes 854,000 postpaid subs and 1.296 million connected devices, around 800,000 of which were connected cars. AT&T’s prepaid subscriber count fell by 180,000 in the quarter, which AT&T blames on declines in GoPhone subscribers and session-based tablet usage.
Looking at smartphones, AT&T tallied 10.1 million postpaid smartphone adds and upgrades in the final months of 2014, including a record number of upgrades. AT&T says that 5.9 million of all smartphone upgrades came through AT&T Next. Meanwhile, it saw 386,000 BYOD adds, a number that’s up more than three times year-over-year. At the end of 2014, 83 percent of AT&T’s postpaid users had smartphones, a stat that’s up from 77 percent one year ago.
AT&T says that adoption of its Mobile Share Value plans also grew at the end of 2014. The number of Mobile Share Value accounts finished the year at 18.4 million, with an average of three devices per account. AT&T also notes that half of its Mobile Share accounts are on 10GB or higher plans and that around 85 percent of its postpaid smartphone users are on usage-based plans, up from 75 percent one year ago.
Postpaid churn for Q4 2014 finished at 1.22 percent, which is up from 1.11 percent in Q4 2013. Churn is a stat that measures how many customers leave a carrier in a given period of time.
Finally, AT&T’s wireless business pulled in $19.9 billion in revenue in the final months of 2014, a number that’s up 7.7 percent year-over-year. Its wireless operating income finished at $3.2 billion, down 18.1 percent year-over-year, a drop that AT&T blames on increased volumes and costs of integrating the Leap Wireless business.
Like Verizon, AT&T managed to add quite a few subscribers to its customer base in the last three months of 2014. Also like Verizon, though, AT&T saw its churn rate grow in the quarter. What’s interesting is that AT&T managed to add a large number of connected vehicles to its user base in Q4 2014, showing that that big blue carrier is betting big on connected cards.
AT&T’s full Q4 2014 report can be found at the link below.