T-Mobile had another strong quarter and another strong year; more of the same is forecast for 2024

T-Mobile said today that it is expecting 2024 to be a strong year with the number of net new postpaid phone additions topping estimates. The nation's second-largest wireless provider, behind Verizon and ahead of AT&T, said that helping it achieve this growth is its 5G coverage and promotions. Recently, Ookla's report on Q4 U.S. data speeds showed complete domination for T-Mobile which had the fastest download and upload speeds for overall wireless and 5G topping Verizon and AT&T.

For 2024, T-Mobile believes it will add 5 million to 5.5 million subscribers which is a huge increase over the 2.67 million new customers that FactSet says the wireless firm will report for this year. Today, T-Mobile announced its results for the fourth quarter of 2023 and it added a whopping 934,000 postpaid phone net customer additions. That topped Wall Street expectations of 877,900 and beat out both AT&T and Verizon. For the entire year, the carrier added 3.1 million postpaid phone net customers to lead the industry.

Postpaid customers are more stable than prepaid customer, and pay their bills for the previous month of usage. Since they don't move around as much as prepaid customers, the churn rate is lower for postpaid and the rate for T-Mobile's postpaid phone service was .96% during Q4 and .87% for all of 2023. Prepaid net customer additions amounted to 53,000 during the last quarter of last year while for 2023, that category had net additions of 282,000 customers. Q3 prepaid churn was 2.86% while the 2.76% prepaid churn for all of 2023 was the lowest in T-Mobile history.

T-Mobile finished 2023 with 119.7 million customer connections, a 5.4% gain from the 113.6 million it had at the end of 2022. Total revenue for the year was $78.6 billion, 1.3% less than 2022's number. Net income soared 221% from $2.59 billion in 2022 to $8.32 billion last year, and earnings per share rose 236.4% to $6.93 from $2.06.

CEO Mike Sievert had this to say about the report: "This was a historic year for T-Mobile, with record outcomes across nearly every metric and industry-leading customer results – including our highest share of postpaid phone net adds since the merger and best-in-class growth in service revenues, profitability and cash flow – all while effectively completing the largest, most successful telecom integration in the world."

The executive added, "What’s really exciting is that while we’ve delivered fantastic results, we've also got room to run. Thanks to the unmatched value and network leadership that we've built, we're entering a phase of enormous value creation with a plan to deliver sustained customer and financial growth leadership. This is just the beginning of the next chapter for the Un-carrier."

The report did not go over well with investors. During regular Wall Street trading hours, T-Mobile's shares rose 56 cents to $162.56, up .35%. But after the report was released, the stock plunged in after-hours trading by $4.06 or 2.5% to $158.50.