AT&T activates 4.8M iPhones in Q1

AT&T Chicago store (interior 001)

Just as we’re counting down the remaining time until Apple’s earnings release, the company’s trusted iPhone distributor AT&T reported corporate earnings related to the first three months of this year. The company added 1.2 million new subscribers and sold six million smartphones, of which 4.8 million were iPhones, accounting for a whopping 80 percent of new smartphone additions.

By contrast, rival Verizon last week said it added 677,000 net new subscribers during the first quarter. Additionally, out of the 7.2 million new smartphone owners in the quarter, Verizon reported that four million were iPhones.

Even with the slowing growth slowed, key metrics matched Wall Street expectations. That wasn’t enough to prevent shares from going down by nearly 1.25 percent in after hours trading. We’ll be listening to AT&T’s conference call later this afternoon for additional data points…

According to a media release, AT&T’s consolidated revenues dropped 1.5 percent from the year-ago period down to $31.4 billion. Net profit was $3.7 billion, or 67 cents per share. This compares to the year-ago profit of $3.6 billion, or 60 cents per share.

Wirelessrevenues came in at $16.7 billion, a modest 3.4 percent annual jump.

ATT Q113 (slide 003)

ATT Q113 (slide 002)

ATT Q113 (slide 001)

The 291,000 net new customers AT&T added in the quarter are mostly tablet and connected business users. Of the 48.3 million on-contract customers, 72 percent had smartphones, AT&T said.

Also worth mentioning, the six million new smartphone additions represent about 81 percent of AT&T’s contract device sales.

The carrier has managed to move fourteen percent of its customers to the Mobile Share plans, or approximately 10 million connections. Fifteen percent of them abandoned their grandfathered unlimited data for one of the shared buckets.

And, over 2.5 million of them picked up a 10GB or higher tier.