T-Mobile rides blazing fast 5G network expansion to record Q4 and full-year customer growth
T-Mobile doesn't have a direct answer for Verizon's recently announced 5G Ultra Wideband expansion... yet, but it does have something big of its own to flaunt today. Something arguably more important for investors than covering 100 million potential customers with a somewhat controversial C-band 5G signal, especially when your tried-and-true mid-band 5G network is already available for over 200 million Americans.
We're talking a record-setting (preliminary) quarterly report including such outstanding figures as 1.8 million postpaid net customer additions and 315 thousand postpaid account net additions, both of which are expected to consolidate Magenta's industry-leading growth position... once again.
More impressively, the former net customer gain will beat everything T-Mo has ever reported during a year-ending quarter before, with the latter number itself looking bound to set a new Q4 record for the last four years.
Perhaps more importantly than ending 2021 on a high note is that the "Un-carrier" estimates postpaid account net additions for the full year will more than double 2020's tally, at 1.2 million. That's a remarkable result given the multiple PR nightmares T-Mobile faced over the last 12 months as the FCC continued to probe 2020's epic outage, followed by the biggest data breach in the operator's history and mounting reports of declining customer service.
Of course, the negative effect of all that bad publicity was largely offset by aggressive deals, competitively priced plans, and a rapidly growing 5G network currently including a slower "Extended Range" component available for "over" 310 million people, or 94 percent of all Americans, and a blazing fast Ultra Capacity signal that more than 210 million people across the nation can already tap into.
Obviously, those absolutely unrivaled numbers are the reason why T-Mo is apparently not sweating Verizon's impending 5G UW expansion to 100 million people. 108.7 million people just so happens to be Magenta's total customer count right now, which is also a new record and further expected to rise as the aforementioned Ultra Capacity 5G service will continue to inch closer to its eventual goal of reaching "more than 90 percent of Americans" (300 million people, to be exact) "by the end of 2023."
Annual postpaid net customer additions hit another incredible all-time company record, at no less than 5.5 million, while postpaid phone net customer additions substantially increased both in Q4 and 2021 in its entirety, to 844 thousand and 2.9 million respectively.
Last but not necessarily least, T-Mobile's buzzworthy 5G Home Internet service just had its best quarter since launch, picking up 224 thousand extra customers to finish the year with a total subscriber base of 646 thousand people, well ahead of the 500K objective set a while back.
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