Posts Tagged last quarter

It’s no secret that since the announcement of the proposed AT&T/T-Mobile merger last March, consumer confidence in Big Magenta has unfortunately gone down. What makes it even more upsetting is the fact that T-Mobile is still pushing out great Android devices with really no end in sight.

As T-Mobile tries to keep things going “business as usual” their customer flow in stores has decreased dramatically. On their third quarter conference call that is reflected in a decrease of 186,000 post paid customers.

More after the break
What’s saving T-Mobile is their prepaid customer base. In the last quarter T-Mobile added 312,000 prepaid customers. There are a couple factors that play into T-Mobile’s prepaid strength. The first is consumer confidence, while some consumers want to stay with T-Mobile, with their future in the air they still don’t trust the idea of starting a new contract with T-Mobile.

The second factor is the trend in going from post paid to prepaid.  Many American’s are switching to a monthly prepaid model so they can control expenses and not have “bill shock” when they open up their monthly bills.

Finally, T-Mobile is the prepaid partner at WalMart so they see a big increase coming from those customers. In Q2 T-Mobile added 231,000 prepaid customers which had a net negative churn overall of 50,000 when factoring in T-Mobile’s 281,000 postpaid defectors last quarter.

T-Mobile has 33.7 million customers which is slightly up from the previuos quarter but down from the same quarter in the previous year.

Earlier this month AT&T announced that they would extend the deadline for closing the T-Mobile deal until the summer of 2012. That will mean another 3 quarters of wavering reports while consumers try to figure out for themselves what’s going on at T-Mobile

source: Phonearena