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T-Mobile posts fourth quarter, 2007 results

Posted by Joe P on February 28, 2008

Year-end reporting tends to come late. This is because not only is the company working on its fourth quarter data, but they’ve got to assemble a report for the year as a whole. We’re seeing many of these announcements come in this week, more than halfway through the first quarter of 2008. T-Mobile is our target today, the nation’s No. 4 wireless carrier. We know they’re not catching Sprint anytime soon, but making up any kind of ground is good for them at this point. Then again, that’s not very tough, considering Sprint is losing customers. So did T-Mo put up a positive mark?

Surely. In the fourth quarter alone, they added 951,000 subscribers. This is less than half of what AT&T and Verizon added, though, uh, considerably more than the 683,000 Sprint lost. They added 857,000 in the third quarter of 2007 and 901,000 in the fourth quarter of 2006, so it’s a gain all around.

Contract customers constituted 77 percent of the growth, which is up from the third quarter (possibly amidst the subprime fears?), but down from 87 percent in the fourth quarter of last year (probably for the same reason). Overall, T-Mobile has 83 percent contract customers.

How about churn? Well, Sprint’s was way up there at 2.3 percent, so you can expect that T-Mo came in a bit lower. They did, at 1.8 percent, which is lower than the third quarter 2007 (2.0 percent) and the fourth quarter 2006 (2.1 percent).

So their growth is solidifying. They’re adding more customers than a year ago, while losing fewer. This will all help them lead the charge towards the third spot on the national charts. It won’t be an easy journey, though. They ended the year with 28.7 million customers, meaning they’re barely halfway to Sprint’s mark. But since Sprint has done little to inspire consumer confidence so far this quarter, we might see further losses from them and greater gains by T-Mobile.

T-Mobile also finished the SunCom acquisition, which bolsters their network coverage. You can check out their coverage map below, courtesy of Gearlog”