It was a good quarter for T-Mobile.
The Bellevue, Wash.-based wireless carrier beat expectations for both revenue and profit during the fourth quarter as it added another 2.1 million total net new customers, marking its 15th-straight quarter of adding at least 1 million new customers.
In its Q4 earnings report, T-Mobile posted $10.2 billion in revenue, up 23 percent year-over-year, and $390 million in profit ($0.45 per share), up 31 percent. Wall Street expected $9.8 billion in revenue and earnings per share of $0.30.
Shares were flat in trading on Tuesday. T-Mobile CEO John Legere called it the “strongest Q4 in the industry.”
? $TMUS was the ONLY wireless company w/ Q4 double digit growth across serv. revenue, total revenue & adj. EBITDA YOY! pic.twitter.com/GKc7HjrcWB
— John Legere (@JohnLegere) February 14, 2017
T-Mobile added 1.2 million branded postpaid customers in Q4 (subscribers who are billed monthly), and 4.1 million total for 2016. Bloomberg noted that the carrier added more monthly customers than Verizon, AT&T, and Sprint last year. T-Mobile now has 72 million subscribers, which still trails Verizon and AT&T.
The company’s $1.5 billion in profit for 2016 was also up 99 percent from the year prior. Last month, its stock reached $60 per share for the first time ever.
The earnings performance shows that T-Mobile is able to grow its top and bottom line even as it continues to roll out new service plans that shake up the wireless industry. The company made several notable moves late last year, like announcing plans to shift to a single wireless plan called T-Mobile One that offers unlimited data; it later streamlined the plan.
T-Mobile also introduced Digits, a new way to use phone numbers across multiple devices and put multiple phone numbers on the same device. Last month, it announced plans to eliminate taxes and fees from subscriber bills, in addition to a new “KickBack” program that will credit customers up to $10/month for unused data on lines that use less than 2 gigabytes per month.
Competitors have responded with similar rollouts; Verizon debuted new unlimited plans earlier this week. The Washington Post has a good rundown of how the various unlimited plans stack up with each other.
