AT&T’s latest earnings report
shows a continuing trend for smartphone sales: they’re strong and getting stronger.
In line with Wall Street expectations, AT&T sold a record 6.8 million smartphones last quarter.
For the second quarter of 2013, AT&T activated at least 3.7 million iPhones. Unfortunately for AT&T, however, Verizon – the nation’s number one carrier – announced last week that it activated 3.8 million iPhones, once again besting the carrier that was Apple’s exclusive carrier partner in the U.S. upon the iPhone’s debut in 2007.
All told, Apple’s smartphone accounted for more than 50% of both telecoms’ smartphone activations in Q2 of this year.
Additionally, AT&T added 551,000 postpaid customers for the quarter, which is the company’s best performance in that sector in five years, while 35% of those were LTE-enabled smartphones.
“This was a solid quarter for revenue and customer additions across our key growth platforms,” says Randall Stephenson, AT&T chairman and CEO.
“Our 4G LTE network is the fastest and the most reliable in the nation, and deployment is ahead of schedule,” Stephenson added. “That contributed to a step-up in postpaid subscriber gains, and strong mobile data revenue growth of nearly 20 percent. Growth in U-verse and strategic business services also continued to be strong — adding to our momentum.”
