The nation’s second-largest wireless carrier,AT&T, yesterday reported its Christmas quarter earnings revealing steady growth, despite T-Mobile’s taunts and its Un-carrier initiative. Although AT&T (and Verizon) stopped divulging iPhone activations, the carrier confirmed selling 7.9 million smartphones in the quarter, a decline from the 10.2 million smartphones it activated a year ago.
AT&T reported$33.2 billion in revenue, good for a profit of $6.9 billion and earnings of $0.53 per share. The company managed to sell 440,000 tablets during the quarter and smartphones made up a whopping 93 percent of total phone sales (77 percent of the postpaid phone base).
Both contract and overall churn rate were at a record low of 1.11 percent and 1.43 percent, respectively. The figure compares favorably to the 1.7 percent churn that T-Mobile had on the quarter.
During the holiday quarter, AT&T rolled out its LTE to abunchofnewmarkets,stopped offeringtraditional monthly voice and data plans to new customers,launched Mobile Share Value planswith No Annual Contract options and unveiled new data plans for tablets with 250MB/1GB buckets for $5 per day/$25 per 3 months.
The firm also signed LTE roaming agreementswith Canada’s RogersandUK’s EE.
iPad Air activations during the opening weekendwere up 200 percenton AT&T’s network compared to last year’s launch. The company’s Next device upgrade program attracted 1.5 million new customers since its July of 2013 launch, the firm said.
