AT&T Mobility continues iPhone-fueled growth: No. 1 carrier adds 1.3M customers, boosts ARPU

AT&T Mobility continued its steady growth during the first quarter of the year, reporting customer additions on par with the previous year and gains in customer revenue that helped push the carrier’s revenues up more than 17%.
For the quarter, the industry’s No. 1 carrier said it added 1.295 million net wireless customers, which was an 8.7% increase compared with the 1.191 million it added during the first quarter of 2007. The numbers pushed the carrier’s customer base to more than 71.3 million subscribers. AT&T Mobility did note however that it lost around 330,000 customers during the quarter as it shut down its TDMA network in late February.
Customer churn remained at 1.7% per month during the quarter, which along with customer growth was inline with analyst forecasts. Cowen and Co. analyst Tom Watts noted continued strong sales of Apple Inc.’s iPhone as well as continued weakness at Sprint Nextel Corp. helped boost AT&T Mobility’s growth during the quarter.
Continuing recent trends, AT&T Mobility also reported an increase in average revenue per user, which hopped 2% year-over-year to $50.18 during the first quarter. The growth pushed the carrier’s service revenues to $10.6 billion for the quarter; AT&T Mobility noted data services accounted for $2.3 billion, or 21.5%, of total service revenues.
The carrier also witnessed a 30% increase in equipment revenues during the quarter, which pushed total revenues up more than 18% to $11.8 billion during the quarter. The strong growth boosted the carrier’s income from $1.5 billion during the first quarter of 2007 to $2.9 billon this year.
AT&T Mobility accounted for the largest share and more than one-third of parent company AT&T Inc.’s revenues for the quarter. AT&T’s stock was trading up slightly after the earnings release.