AT&T today said it will retain Capex (capital spending) at $21 billion for the full year despite showing poor performance in the second quarter.
Its Capex (capital expenditures) was $6 billion in the second quarter of 2014.
Also read: Revenue analysis: AT&T v/s Verizon in Q2
Sharing an update on Project VIP-related deployment, AT&T said it has more than 290 million POPs covered by 4G LTE. The company’s LTE deployment is expected to be substantially complete this summer.
Randall Stephenson, AT&T chairman and CEO, said: “Project VIP investments continue to drive impressive growth in U-verse and strategic business services.”
AT&T has passed more than 500,000 additional business customer locations with fiber since Project VIP was announced.
With increased customer orders for fiber-based services and the addition of new fiber initiatives such as U-verse with AT&T GigaPower, the company can now more economically provide fiber services to buildings with fewer than six business locations.
AT&T, which is competing with Google in its fiber deployment, now expects to build fiber services to more than 1 million business locations regardless of building size. This change will have no impact on capital spending expectations, said AT&T.
LTE smartphones are nearly two-thirds of postpaid smartphone bsase. 63 percent of AT&T’s postpaid smartphone customers used an LTE-capable device.
AT&T added 1.6 million postpaid smartphones. 80 percent, or 54.6 million, of AT&T’s postpaid phone subscribers had smartphones, up from 73 percent, or 49.5 million, a year earlier. Smartphones accounted for 92 percent of postpaid phone sales. AT&T’s ARPU for smartphones is more than twice that of non-smartphone subscribers.
AT&T said its revenues rose 1.6 percent to $32.6 billion, while its net income decreased 7.8 percent to $3.5 billion.
Eric Costa, telecom analyst at TBR, said AT&T will achieve revenue growth in the low double digits in Q3 2014 by rapidly deploying the remainder of its initial LTE network, executing Project VIP to improve its network quality and reliability, and drawing additional subscribers to its Mobile Share plans.
These initiatives will strengthen AT&T’s business and drive higher data consumption, enabling AT&T to better monetize its offerings and gain ground on Verizon, who outperformed AT&T in revenue and subscriber growth in Q2 2014.
Baburajan K
editor@telecomlead.com
