Telecom giant AT&T issued its Q1 06 financial results today showing continued strong gains in both DSL and mobile customers. As to the company’s financials…well, it’s hard to say. This was AT&T’s first full quarter since the merger of SBC and AT&T and much of the company’s spin on the performance compared the combined company to what had been just SBC during the year-ago quarter.
Much of the financial press reported these apples-to-oranges numbers, but what I present below are “normalized” financial data that include both companies for all time periods. Looked at this way, the numbers aren’t bad, but they’re not as glowing as you may have read elsewhere.
Despite a 6% drop in access lines and a 5% drop in overall revenue, AT&T boosted its net income by 10%, which rose from $1.3 bil. to $1.4 bil. year-over-year. Helping this boost in profitability was the continued strong gains in the lucrative DSL and mobile voice market.
During the quarter, AT&T added 511,000 net new DSL customers, slightly more than the 504,000 net new DSL customers added during the year-ago quarter. AT&T ended the quarter with 7.4 million DSL subscriptions, or around 15% of its total access lines. The company said the 7.4 million figure represented 27.7% of consumer primary lines.
At the same time, AT&T continued to lose local access lines, which dropped to 48.8 million by quarter’s end, a loss of 6% year-over-year.
The company’s mobile voice business, however, is booming, with AT&T’s Cingular arm adding 1.67 million net new mobile voice customers during the quarter. By the end of Q1 06, AT&T served 55.8 million wireless voice customers, up 11% year-over-year.
| AT&T Key Statistics* | 1Q05 | 2Q05 | 3Q05 | 4Q05 | 1Q06 |
| Total access lines (mil.) | 51.9 | 51.0 | 50.2 | 49.4 | 48.8 |
| DSL customers (000) | 5,608 | 5,968 | 6,496 | 6,921 | 7,432 |
| % of total lines | 10.81% | 11.69% | 12.94% | 14.01% | 15.24% |
| Quarterly adds (000) | 504 | 360 | 528 | 425 | 511 |
| Video Customers (000) | 394 | 404 | 419 | 457 | 491 |
| Wireless Voice Customers (000) | 50,350 | 51,442 | 52,292 | 54,144 | 55,810 |
| Total operating revenues (mil.) | $16,670 | $16,602 | $16,468 | $16,279 | $15,835 |
| Net Income (mil.) | $ 1,319 | $ 1,257 | $ 1,729 | $ 1,862 | $ 1,445 |
| *Financial data normalized to include AT&T Inc. and AT&T Corp. | |||||
Cynthia Brumfield at 7:12 PM|Comments(0)
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