Driven by 18.3 percent growth in wireless data revenues and a 38.3 percent growth in U-verse revenues, AT&T posted Q3 revenues of $31.5 billion, flat versus the year-earlier quarter. but up 2.6% when excluding the divested Advertising Solutions business unit.
AT&T said its LTE deployment is ahead of schedule, already covering more than 135 million POPs.
Operating income was $6.0 billion, down from $6.2 billion; and AT&T’s operating income margin was 19.2 percent, compared to 19.8 percent.
Net income for the quarter totaled $3.6 billion, or $0.63 per diluted share, consistent with $3.6 billion, or $0.61 per diluted share, in the year-earlier quarter. When adjusted for Advertising Solutions, earnings per share was $0.62 compared to $0.59 in the year-ago quarter.
“We had another impressive quarter with strong earnings growth, record cash flows and solid returns to shareholders through dividends and share buybacks”, said Randall Stephenson, AT&T chairman and chief executive officer. “In wireless, we had another excellent smartphone quarter, penetration of usage-based mobile data plans continues to climb, and our 4G LTE network build is ahead of schedule. And in wireline, our IP network continues to deliver strong gains in U-verse high speed Internet connections, which helped drive an almost 10 percent increase in broadband data ARPU. Our strong performance allows us to increase our free cash flow guidance to $18 billion or higher this year, exceeding our previous outlook by $2 billion.”
Some highlights:
Wireless
- Wireless service revenues increased 4.5 percent, to $14.9 billion, in the third quarter.
- Postpaid subscriber ARPU increased 2.4 percent versus the year-earlier quarter to $65.20, the strongest growth in six quarters.
- AT&T sold 6.1 million smartphones in the third quarter, 1.3 million more than in the third quarter a year ago.
- Smartphones represented 81 percent of postpaid device sales.
- At the end of the quarter, 63.8 percent, or 44.5 million, of AT&T’s postpaid subscribers had smartphones, up from 52.6 percent, or 36.1 million, a year earlier and up 1.4 milion from the second quarter.
- About 64 percent, or 28.5 million of all smartphone subscribers are on usage-based data plans.
Wireline
- Total third-quarter wireline revenues were $14.8 billion, down 1.6 percent versus the year-earlier quarter and down slightly sequentially.
- Revenues from residential customers totaled $5.4 billion, an increase of 2.0 percent versus the third quarter a year ago and their strongest growth in more than four years.
- Total AT&T U-verse subscribers (TV and high speed Internet) reached 7.4 million in the third quarter. AT&T U-verse TV added 198,000 subscribers to reach 4.3 million in service.
- AT&T U-verse High Speed Internet delivered a third-quarter net gain of 613,000 subscribers to reach a total of 7.1 million, helping offset losses from DSL.
- Overall, AT&T wireline broadband connections decreased 42,000.
- Total business revenues were $9.1 billion, down 2.6 percent versus the year-earlier quarter and slightly lower than the second quarter of 2012.
- AT&T’s most advanced business solutions — including Ethernet, VPNs, hosting, IP conferencing and application services — grew 11.4 percent versus the year-earlier quarter.