T-Mobile reports its "strongest year ever" says the CEO of America's 5G leader

T-Mobile this afternoon reported its fourth-quarter financials and also included the results for all of 2021. The carrier, which rose from dead last among the four majors to its current position behind only Verizon in the United States, continues to perform strongly. Company CEO Mike Sievert left no doubt about how well the carrier fared this year.

Sievert told investors that "T-Mobile had our strongest year ever. We didn’t just meet the bold goals we set for 2021 around customer growth, profitability, merger synergies and
network buildout – we crushed all of them. Our industry-leading year-end results – adding 1.2 million postpaid accounts and 5.5 million postpaid customers, extending Ultra Capacity 5G to 210 million people – show that the Un-carrier is experiencing the greatest growth momentum in wireless."

Looking ahead, the executive stated that T-Mobile is "...poised to sustain that position into 2022 and beyond as we continue to execute on our winning playbook and consistently
make investments that have enabled our success. With plenty of room to run, we’re in the best-ever position to continue delivering."

For the fourth quarter of 2021, the carrier announced that it had 844,000 postpaid phone net customer additions. For the full year, it added 2.9 million. Postpaid phone churn was 1.10% in Q4 as integration with Sprint customers picked up. For the entire year, churn for this category was .98%.

T-Mobile picked-up an industry-leading 1.8 million postpaid net customer additions from October through December (best fourth quarter ever for T-Mobile). For the entire year, T-Mobile added a record-high 5.5 million postpaid net customer additions. This topped expectations that ranged from 5.1 million to 5.3 million. Overall, T-Mobile ended the year with a record-high 108.7 million customers.

The carrier added 315,000 postpaid net account additions, the highest fourth-quarter total in four years. For the full year, T-Mobile more than doubled the number of postpaid net account additions to score a record 1.2 million.

Prepaid net customer additions totaled 49,000 during the fourth quarter of 2021. That was down sequentially from the third quarter of 2021 when the wireless provider reported 66,000 net customer additions. It also was down from the 84,000 prepaid net customer additions that the company had during the same quarter last year.. Still, for all of 2021, the number of net customer additions in prepaid more than doubled to 342,000 from the 145,000 reported in 2020.

 T-Mobile's low-band Extended Range 5G, which uses the carrier's low-band 600MHz spectrum, covered 94% of the U.S. population at the end of the year. Its faster mid-band Ultra Capacity 5G covered 210 million people in the states as the year ended. The latter can deliver download data speeds at 350 Mbps peaking at 1 Gbps.

Speaking of 5G, T-Mobile pointed out today that its 5G mid-band spectrum, mostly in the 2.5GHz range, does not interfere with aircraft altimeters as the C-band 5G signals do. T-Mobile does not use C-band and is not affected by what is going on with Verizon and AT&T's mid-band signals potentially disrupting air traffic in the states.

Several third-party testing firms have called T-Mobile the early 5G leader in the states. For example, Opensignal wrote, "T-Mobile customers enjoy the fastest average 5G download and upload speeds and can connect to 5G more often and in more places than anyone else. The gap over competitors has gotten wider as T-Mobile’s average 5G download speed is more than 2.5x faster than Verizon’s average 5G download speed and more than 3x faster than AT&T’s average 5G download speed.

Other firms that have appointed T-Mobile the King of 5G in the U.S. include Ookla and umlaut.

For the quarter, T-Mobile generated revenue of $14.6 billion, up 1.6% on a sequential basis from the third quarter, and 5.5% on an annual basis. For the year, the company took in $58.40 billion for a 15.8% hike year-over-year.

Net income, at $422 million, was down 38.9% compared to the previous quarter, and on a year-over-year basis, it was down 43.7%. For the year, T-Mobile's bottom line was $3.02 billion, down 1.3% on an annual basis. Diluted earnings per share (EPS) came in at 34 cents for the fourth quarter, a 38.2% decline from last year's third quarter, and a 43.3% drop year-over-year.

For all of 2021, T-Mobile reported EPS of $2.41, 9.1% lower than the figure announced in 2020. For 2022, T-Mobile expects to lead the industry for the eighth consecutive year in postpaid net customer additions which are expected to be between 5.0 million and 5.5 million.

T-Mobile's shares rose 3 cents during the regular trading session to $109.58. After the news broke, the stock soared $8.62 to $118.20.