AT&T Mobility Q1 results bolstered by non-traditional devices

AT&T Mobility posted first quarter financial results showing an increased dependency on non-traditional mobile devices as well as a considerable slowing of lucrative postpaid net customer additions.

 

For its first fiscal quarter, AT&T Mobility said it added 1.9 million net activations to its network, which was well ahead of the 1.5 million expected by analysts, ending the quarter with nearly 87 million total customers. The growth was boosted by strong adoption of connected devices, including e-readers, GPS devices and alarm monitoring systems, which the carrier said accounted for 1.1 million net adds during the quarter and totaled 5.8 million devices.

 

AT&T Mobility said it added 512,000 direct postpaid customers during the quarter, which was inline with estimates, but a substantial drop from the 875,000 direct postpaid customer additions the carrier reported during the first quarter of 2009 and the more than 900,000 it added during the final three months of last year.

 

Helping bolster its customer growth for the quarter was a drop in customer churn from 1.56% during the first quarter of 2009 to 1.3% this year. Postpaid churn also dropped from 1.15% in 2009 to 1.07% this year.

 

AT&T Mobility noted that nearly half of its 65.1 million postpaid customers had a device that included a real or virtual QWERTY keyboard, an increase from 31.9% at the end of the first quarter of 2009. Apple Inc.’s iPhone continues to be a hot seller at the carrier with 2.7 million gross activations on its network during the quarter compared with 1.6 million during the first quarter of 2009, though down from the 3.1 million activated during the fourth quarter of 2009. AT&T Mobility noted that one-third of the iPhones activated were from customers new to the carrier. 

 

That strong integrated device growth helped pushed postpaid average revenue per user up nearly 4% year-over-year to $61.89, with postpaid data ARPU increasing nearly 22% to $20.13. Total data revenues surged nearly 30% year-over-year to $4.1 billion or nearly 32% of the carrier’s $12.85 billion in total wireless revenues during the quarter.

 

AT&T Mobility reported total revenues, including device sales, increased 8.2% year-over-year to $13.897 billion, while income was up nearly 21% to $4.169 billion. AT&T Inc.’s wireless division accounted for 45% of the company’s total revenues for the quarter.

 

AT&T Mobility rival Verizon Wireless is scheduled to release first quarter results tomorrow.