VoiceStream Wireless Corp. pronounced itself the fastest growing wireless company in the nation last week as it detailed its strategy for tying together former Omnipoint Corp. and Aerial Communications Inc. properties and its plans for wireless data service to analysts during its quarterly conference call last week.
“Our growth exceeded that of every other national carrier,” said VoiceStream Chairman and Chief Executive Officer John Stanton. “We believe we garnered approximately 30 percent of the incremental subscribers in an average six-player market. We believe we can replicate our success across our new national footprint as the quality of our networks is ready and as we launch the VoiceStream brand name.”
VoiceStream’s first-quarter results were mixed as it accounted for the acquisition of Omnipoint. Its acquisition of Aerial became final earlier this month.
The Global System for Mobile communications operator recorded a net loss of $203.3 million, or $1.68 per share, compared with a loss of $77.2 million, or 81 cents per share the previous year. Analysts had predicted a loss of $1.14 per share. Several analysts maintained their “buy” ratings on the company’s stock based on the company’s growth potential. Annualized incremental penetration in the fourth quarter reached 2.6 percent in VoiceStream’s branded markets.
VoiceStream added 322,600 customers during the first quarter, which includes VoiceStream and Omnipoint customers, ending the first quarter with 1.8 million customers. Sales reached $256 million from last year’s $67.7 million. EBITDA loss was $31.4 million.
VoiceStream said it will launch its brand name in former Omnipoint and Aerial markets within the next three months, which corresponds to the company’s rollout of new billing and customer care systems.
“To be clear, there will be no more parrot,” said Bob Stapleton, president of VoiceStream. “Jamie Lee Curtis is our national spokesperson, and she will help make VoiceStream highly visible and credible in the marketplace.”
VoiceStream said it plans to offer its Get More pricing plans, which have been the company’s growth catalyst, in every market by the end of the year.
“When we launched our VoiceStream services two years ago using the Get More brand name, we said our goal was to deliver more services, more features and more minutes,” said Stanton. “We used that strategy to become the fastest growing company in wireless. We will position our data and Internet offering similarly.”
The company last week commercially introduced MyVoiceStream.com, its own company-controlled branded portal. Using InfoSpace’s Internet platform, the portal will be customized to VoiceStream’s needs and will allow customers to choose personalized information to conduct commerce from their handsets.
Customers will have the ability to send and receive e-mail, select personalized news services delivered to their handsets and view and pay their bills online.
This summer, VoiceStream said it will add more content providers and e-commerce capabilities to the portal. VoiceStream said it will select what services customers will receive, focusing on entertainment, shopping and travel services. The company said it will support both Wireless Application Protocol-based handsets as well as HTML-based phones to maximize the content customers will receive. Stapleton said HTML-based browsers have been a pivotal element of Japan operator NTT DoCoMo’s success in offering its iMode wireless Internet service.
VoiceStream also believes it is in a better position than its competitors when migrating to higher-speed packet data. It plans to roll out General Packet Radio Services in selected markets this fall.
“We believe we will have a 12-month head start based on GPRS,” said Stapleton. “Other digital technologies will have to do too many things right to compete faster than that.”
Code Division Multiple Access operators plan to deploy higher data speeds by mid-2001, while Time Division Multiple Access operators will introduce packet data services sometime in late 2001 or early 2002, say analysts.
VoiceStream said it initially will offer 56 kilobits-per-second speeds via PCMCIA cards. The company is hoping at least one GPRS handset will be available by the end of the year.
“We’ll have data cards, which surveys indicate is the predominant preferred method for customers that want high-speed Internet access,” said Stapleton. “We’ll have those in the fourth quarter, and we’re optimistic that we’ll have at least one handset. We’re hoping to have more than one next year.”
The carrier believes its GPRS network, which cost around $25 million for the backbone, will carry the company a long way into the data market as it continues to increase GPRS data speeds and use new vocoders to increase network capacity.
