T-Mobile US on Tuesday reported first quarter revenue was up 13.1% on last year driven by continued strong growth in its customer base.
For the three months to 31 March, the operator’s net additions came in at 1.8 million, of which 1.1 million were branded postpaid customers. 991,000 of that sum were phone customers, while 134,000 were mobile broadband customers. Branded postpaid net additions were 73,000.
"We’ve had eight consecutive quarters with more than one million total net customer additions, proving that customers want value," said John Legere, CEO of T-Mobile US, in a statement. "We expect to once again capture all of the industry’s postpaid phone growth in Q1 and we’ve done it while delivering a an all-time record low 1.3% churn."
Including machine-to-machine (M2M) and MVNO customers, T-Mobile US ended March with 56.8 million connections, which could put it ahead of nearest ri val Sprint, which is due to report its figures for the first three months of 2015 on 5 May. Sprint ended 2014 with 55.9 million connections.
Following the strong net additions, T-Mobile raised its subscriber growth outlook for 2015 to 3 million-3.5 million branded postpaid net additions from 2.2 million-3.2 million.
On the financial side, T-Mobile’s Q1 service revenue climbed 9% on last year to reach $5.8 billion. Total revenue surged 13.1% to $7.8 billion.
Operating expenses jumped to $7.7 billion from $6.9 billion. Opex was driven by higher cost of equipment sales resulting from an increase in the number of devices sold, and higher selling, general and admin (SG&A) costs due to promotional activities, and more retail and customer support staff.
Despite swinging to an operating profit of $117 million from a year earlier loss of $28 million, the higher costs meant T-Mobile US notched up a net loss attributable to shareholders of $77 million. However, it was still an improvement on last year’s $151 million net loss.
