T-Mobile US Inc.’s third-quarter profit slipped as higher costs and a lull in new customer additions following a headline-grabbing hack sapped its bottom line.
The company said it added 673,000 phone subscribers in the closely watched market for postpaid wireless service during the September-ended quarter. The tally lagged behind AT&T Inc., which reported a net gain of 928,000 such subscribers, over the same span.
T-Mobile finance chief Peter Osvaldik said in an interview that the company performed against the challenge of shifting millions of Sprint customers over to a new network and billing system, a time of confusion that offered AT&T and Verizon Communications Inc. more opportunities to poach subscribers.
“That is a tailwind to them that is soon to become a headwind,” Mr. Osvaldik said. The company said more than half of the old Sprint’s customers had moved over to T-Mobile’s network.
The cellphone carrier delivered the results on Tuesday to an investor base spoiled by years of superlative growth. AT&T and Verizon, both of which last month reported their strongest wireless customer gains in years, are making it harder for the younger T-Mobile to report the same rapid growth it enjoyed just a year ago.
“Historically, the level of growth we’ve seen from T-Mobile has been unprecedented,” Colby Synesael, an analyst for investment bank Cowen, said before the company released its results Tuesday. But investor concerns have since grown as new cellphone customers become harder to win. “AT&T has been a share donor to everyone else for the last number of years and has chosen to be more aggressive,” he said. “That has upset the apple cart.”
T-Mobile’s overall third-quarter profit fell to $691 million, or 55 cents a share, compared with a year-earlier result of $1.25 billion, or $1 a share. Merger costs jumped to $955 million from $288 million the same time a year earlier. Overall revenue rose 1.8% to $19.62 billion.
For the better part of the 2010s, T-Mobile looked more like a nimble technology company than a staid telephone operator. Then-Chief Executive John Legere had a reputation for heckling the competition, winning new customers and satisfying investors with strong growth. The cellphone carrier entered the new decade with an even bigger prize, closing a controversial acquisition of rival Sprint Corp.
T-Mobile has continued to mop up subscribers since CEO Mike Sievert took charge in early 2020, but investors’ enthusiasm has wavered. Its shares have fallen about 20% from an all-time high in July, under pressure from concerns about profit-killing competition and the loss of future revenue from Dish Network Corp. as a user of its network.
Shares rose 2.33% to $118.50 after hours Tuesday.
The summer theft of more than 50 million customer records, disclosed in August, added to the company’s challenges. Executives said that the bad news briefly hurt the growth before business started to pick up later in the quarter.
T-Mobile’s future for now exists in a market dominated by three wireless companies, with smaller players on the margins. Big cable companies continue to rack up subscriptions from customers bundling cellphone service with home broadband. Dish, another potential competitor, is building its own wireless network from scratch.
Executives at the company, a subsidiary of European telecom giant Deutsche Telekom AG, suggested Tuesday that customer gains at rival carriers, especially AT&T, weren’t sustainable. “As competition heats up, you shouldn’t paint us all with the same brush,” Mr. Sievert said Tuesday.
T-Mobile raised its estimate of free cash flow this year to between $5.5 billion and $5.6 billion, up from its earlier $5.2 billion to $5.5 billion forecast.
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