Telecommunications goliath AT&T (NYSE:T, news, filings) gave us our weekly peek into its finances with its Q3 earnings report this morning. The verdict: unsurprising unless you were silly enough to think that the iPhone wasn’t selling well. Revenues of $30.86B were precisely on target, at least according to the analysts compiled by Yahoo finance, and earnings per share of $0.54 were even a bit higher than expected. The highlights of course were the 3.2M iPhones activated during the quarter and the net gain of 2M wireless subscribers, now totalling 81.6M subscribers. Those additions were huge numbers which no doubt account for the continued rise in wireless data revenues by 33.6% over the same quarter last year.
On the wireline side, revenues fell sequentially to $16.30B from $16.53B in the prior quarter, mostly due to declines in voice revenues. Of course you wouldn’t know that from the PR, in which we are reminded that U-Verse, Broadband subscribers, Consumer IP revenues, Business IP Data revenues, Strategic Business Service revenues, and Revenues per household were all up strongly. Ah well, that’s public relations for you, and AT&T can hire the best. Total wireline revenue-generating connections continued their inevitable steady decline, but by only 600K or so this quarter.
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Categories: Financials · ILECs, PTTs
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Robert, have you notated that, excluding Iphone’s “losing proposition,” T lost 1.2M regular wireless customers during the Q?
ATT pays $600 per IPhone and sells them for $200 with a “plan.” Apple gets margin on the phone and a percentage of the ATT plan sold.
This may out some of their numbers and Apple’s into better perspective.
VZ was approached first for such a magnificent offer from Apple and declined.