CHICAGO—U.S. Cellular Corp. and its parent company, Telephone and Data Systems Corp., reported their much-delayed fourth-quarter figures for 2005 and updates to their 2006 guidance.
U.S. Cellular saw its customer base expand by 11 percent compared to 2004; its retail customer base grew 10 percent. U.S. Cellular ended the fourth quarter with 5.48 million customers, and about 4.9 million of those were retail subscribers.
The carrier’s postpaid churn rate was 1.6 percent in the fourth quarter of 2005, holding steady from the same period in 2004; churn was 1.5 percent for the full-year 2005, down from 1.7 percent in the previous year. Average revenue per user for U.S. Cellular was at $45.94—up from the $45.41 that the carrier registered in the fourth quarter of 2004, but down sequentially from the $46.19 ARPU reached in the third quarter of 2005.
The company reported total operating revenue of $787 million for the fourth quarter of 2005, an increase of 11 percent from the previous year’s fourth quarter. Operating revenues for the full year totaled $3 billion, an increase of about 8 percent from 2004.
The nation’s sixth-largest carrier said that it expects to gain between 370,000 and 400,000 net new retail subscribers this year and post service revenues of about $3.2 billion. U.S. Cellular projected its operating income for 2006 will be between $250 million and $300 million, and that its capital expenditures will reach between $580 million and $610 million.
The two companies are catching up on quarterly filings since a series of financial restatements that dated back to 2000; they began working on the restatements last November and began filing them in April. Because the late filings put them out of compliance with the listing standards of the American Stock Exchange, where the two companies’ stock is traded, the companies asked for and received a series of extensions. The current deadline for the companies to complete all of their late filings is Nov. 14, 2006.
