T-Mobile remains the hottest US carrier defined by net phone adds and hardware sales. The company has added one million or more postpaid net adds for 22 straight quarters. During the third quarter, T-Mobile won 774k postpaid phone net adds. Verizon was next closest at 295k. This is impressive since the US wireless industry is in a period of very low churn -- Verizon and AT&T’s phone churn is under 1%. So, to create and steal that many premium phone subs above its peers for so many quarters is impressive. As impressive is how much hardware the company is selling. T-Mobile sold 5.3m branded postpaid smartphones and 2.8m smartphones within its T-Mobile Magenta and Metro by T-Mobile prepaid brands. Handset OEMs successful within T-Mobile have been able to ride with this success:
Can T-Mobile continue to grow? The company believes it can. T-Mobile is under-indexed within B2B channels. Since its network is no longer an Achilles’ heel, it is capturing large enterprise contracts. A few recent key wins include Delta, Shell, and the US Navy. A creative ‘un-carrier’ international offering for all subscribers (free texting and 2G data) also helps.
The company has also rebranded its prepaid channel it bought back in 2013, MetroPCS. The new name is a subtle change--Metro by T-Mobile. The company believes its prepaid channel will be able to better draft off of the improved T-Mobile brand and network. T-Mobile has also implemented its own un-carrier offerings within prepaid to spice things up. Metro offers Google One and Amazon Prime for subscribers with $50 and $60 service plans. These offers are gaining good traction within Metro.
With T-Mobile’s purchase of $8b worth of 600MHz spectrum, the company is hoping to be the rural carrier of choice. With its better propagation, T-Mobile is using 600MHz as collateral to make the merger with Sprint a reality. Part of its marketing pitch involves bringing better coverage to rural and underserved areas. Late to LTE full coverage, T-Mobile has subs to steal in rural pockets of the US. For more T-Mobile analysis and hardware sales within all T-Mobile channels see T-Mobile Continues to Gain Subs and Sell Hardware Above Expectations.
For many quarters conventional wisdom has been T-Mobile will not be able to continue its phone net add dominance. Now that it has been dominating for years, it is clear other carriers will have to shake things up with new ideas.