Mobile 4Q profit triples as it continues adding customers

“We set out to change this industry, we’re well on our way and we won’t stop”, said T-Mobile US chief executive John Legere, in a statement. T-Mobile said the total included 1.3 million branded postpaid customers, 469,000 branded prepaid customers and 301,000 wholesale customers.

T-Mobile’s latest earnings release indicates the company continues to be a major thorn in the side of AT&T, Verizon and Sprint, adding notably more postpaid phone customers than all three.

“T-Mobile was the only operator to not disappoint on ARPU, the monthly phone payments of its customers”, BTIG Research analyst Walter Piecyk said. The company’s growth in the quarter included 1.3 million branded postpaid customers, a key measure of a wireless carrier’s health. For the quarter, total net adds fell to 2.06 million from the year-ago 2.128 million. Sequentially, churn was stable instead of the typical seasonal increase. The telecom service provider also added subscribers in the branded postpaid and prepaid in the December quarter. It was the exact opposite in the fourth quarter.

As we can see in the above bar chart, among the top four USA mobile players, T-Mobile is the third largest by market capitalization. Total revenues were up 1.1%; service revenues were up 11.7%. Capex is projected to be in the Dollars 4.5 billion to 4.8 billion range. “The average revenue per postpaid user … is much higher, and we’ve built off of that into the derivation value to the company”. Revenue rose 1.1 percent to $8.25 billion. Lines per account grew to 2.54 in the fourth quarter of 2015, up from 2.36 in the fourth quarter of 2014. The short interest to T Mobile US Incorporated’s float is 6.34%. Adjusted EBITDA also benefited from a United States dollars 139 million gain related to a spectrum licence transaction. Earnings per share for the full year 2015 were 82 cents.

The Q4 results show the company’s net income jumped to $297m from $101m one year previously. For the year, net income hit $733 million, up 197 percent from the year ago. Its up 0.30, from 1.13 in 2015Q1.

Net cash provided by operating activities was $2.2 billion in the fourth quarter of 2015, up from $1.4 billion in the fourth quarter of 2014.