AT&T – successful fall quarter with 3.1 million iPhones activated

31st January, 2010 by Adina
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A few days ago, AT&T announced it has had one of the best fall seasons in its recent history. The company has added not less than 2.7 million new cellular customers to its network and has activated a total of 3.1 million iPhones, the second-best result in its history for total additions and iPhone activations as well. This result falls short of the record 3.2 million Apple devices from this summer. AT&T has now a total of 85.1 million clients and had a faster growth than Verizon, closing the gap between them by 500,000 subscribers.

It is not clear, however, how many iPhone customers have left the network, but the smartphone has played a positive role in AT&T’s successful fall quarter. Its presence in the network means that 46.4 percent of the 65.1 million subscription phones are “integrated devices” with 3G and QWERTY keyboards. Revenue from wireless data has soared 26.3 percent, i.e. $3.9 billion, the average revenue per person slightly increasing just over $61. These helped spending on data plans to raise by 17.5 percent.

The carrier has attained the best turnover rate for the fall and marked a churn of just 1.19 percent in what concerns subscription phone users. Although higher than Verizon’s, it was a sixth consecutive quarter of drops in the number of new customers replacing old ones.

Generally speaking, the company was much more profitable and gathered a net income of $3 billion compared to $2.4 billion one year ago. It also lowered very slightly its operating expenses to exactly $26 billion, although twice as many iPhones were activated and one million other devices with “free” 3G were added, such as the Nook from Barnes & Noble.

For Apple, the news is good as it represents almost no drop-off in the United States for launch sales. In 2009, iPhone 3G activations have registered a sharp fall at AT&T after the last summer.


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