The second largest wireless carrier in the US, AT&T has reported its full year and last quarter results with strong wireless net adds and record postpaid gross adds and upgrades. AT&T’s fourth quarter revenues increased 3.8% in Q4 to $34.4 billion, and full year revenues came to $132 billion representing a 3.1% increase compared to 2013.
AT&T said that its total wireless revenues were up 7.7 percent year over year to $19.9 billion. Within that figure, wireless equipment revenues increased 72.3 percent to $4.8 billion, the company said, as more customers chose equipment installment plans versus subsidized devices.
AT&T gained 854,000 post-paid net adds and 3.3 million net adds in total during the year. AT&T's postpaid churn however has increased slightly to 1.22% in Q4, compared to 2013 Q4 1.1%.
The telecom giant also reported an impressive 52 million connections on its Mobile Share plan, representing nearly 70 percent of postpaid subscribers, of which half of Mobile Share accounts are on data plans of 10 gigabytes or higher.
Randall Stephenson, AT&T chairman and CEO
Over the last year, we’ve made several moves to significantly transform our business for the future. Our transactions with DIRECTV and Mexican wireless companies Iusacell and Nextel Mexico will make us a very different company. We’ll be unique in the industry because we’ll be able to offer integrated capabilities across a diversified base of services, customers, geographies and technology platforms. After we close DIRECTV, our largest revenue stream will come from business-related accounts, followed by U.S. TV and broadband, U.S. consumer mobility and then international mobility and TV. We ended the year substantially complete with our Project VIP network initiative and with most of our postpaid smartphone customers off of device subsidy plans. As a result, our full-year performance saw record-low postpaid customer churn and best-ever wireless service margins – all in a highly competitive wireless market.
