AT&T Mobility posted an industry leading 2.2M net connection additions for Q4
Bolstered by a strong turnaround in its prepaid operations, AT&T Mobility showed a 17.3% year-over-year increase to 2.2 million net connection additions for the fourth quarter of last year. The carrier’s prepaid services, which are dominated by its Cricket brand, managed to grow from a loss of 67,000 customers in Q4 2014, to posting 469,000 net additions in Q4 2015.
Prepaid growth managed to make up for a 38.4% year-over-year dip in postpaid net additions, which dropped to 526,000 for Q4 2015, and relatively flat growth from “connected devices.” The telecom operator also noted its recently consolidated Mexico operations added 593,000 net connections during Q4 2015, though lost 96,000 connections for the full year.
AT&T Mobility’s overall growth numbers outpaced those from Verizon Wireless, which said it added 1.4 million “retail” connections in Q4, though AT&T Mobility’s postpaid growth was just one-third of the 1.5 million net connections reported by its most direct rival.
For bragging rights, AT&T Mobility did manage to outgrow T-Mobile US in terms of overall connection growth for the quarter, with its smaller rival reporting 2.1 million net connections for Q4 2015. But, similar to Verizon Wireless, T-Mobile US easily outpaced AT&T Mobility in terms of higher-revenue generating postpaid growth.
To round out the nationwide comparisons, Sprint managed less than one-quarter of AT&T Mobility’s overall growth for the quarter, though it did manage to nearly match it larger rival in terms of postpaid growth.
Continuing an industry wide trend, AT&T Mobility posted a dip in customer churn, with postpaid churn dropping from 1.22% to 1.18% year-over-year, and overall churn falling from 1.59% to 1.5%.
Despite the strong wireless growth, AT&T’s mobile services posted a dip in overall revenues for the quarter. The operator’s “consumer mobility” division witnessed revenues drop 8.1% year-over-year to $8.7 billion, while the mobile portion of its “business solutions” operations fell from $10.3 billion in Q4 2014 to $10.1 billion last year.
Highlighting the significant diversification from AT&T in 2015, mobile services accounted for 44.7% of overall company revenues during Q4 2015 compared with 57.6% in Q4 2014.
In a sign of its growing operations, AT&T said its workforce increased 15.5% in 2015, employing 281,450 people at the end of the year.
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