The Six Five team discusses T-Mobile’s latest earnings.
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Transcript:
Patrick Moorhead: I think T-Mobile does one of the best spreads, the best productions when it comes to earnings. I mean they are the un-carrier, so they are going to do it differently and they’re going to do it quite very differently versus Verizon and AT&T. So overall they beat on EPS by that 16%, a slight miss on revenue. Now they did beat on consensus expectations on postpaid net additions, postpaid net customer additions, high speed internet, EBITDA and adjusted cash flow. So the company company’s doing great. Hey, we have a guest. How about that?
Daniel Newman: Mr. Lotko just wanted to say hi. Broadcom’s head of their mainframe software division. So he is rolling in saying hi and interrupting your flow.
Pat Moorhead: How about that? Hey, we haven’t had a guest pop in since Pat G at Mobile World Congress, but it’s great to see Six Five customers out there. And Dan, it’s too bad that the Six Five isn’t there right now, but we are in spirit. The Five is there. Nice to see-
Daniel Newman: The Six Five will be doing a summit recording here today with Greg. So this is Six Five Summit, which by the way, you better have signed up for. Yeah, it’s going, it’s going, but I’ll let you keep going because I know both running long here.
Pat Moorhead: Yeah, but no, overall, I mean the company did great. The one thing I really would like to see from T-Mobile is, hey, can you talk a little bit about T-Mobile For Business? As we’ve seen with Google, even though Google Cloud is particularly in the beginning was such a small part of their business, Google still talked about them and particularly over the last year. So I would love to know how T-Mobile For Business is doing and right now based on the earnings, we have no idea. I know I like the T-Mobile For Business strategy, I like many of the services that they brought out, but I don’t think it elicits confidence to just not talk about it. Now, I totally understand that the size might be small, but I feel like earnings have really turned into a lot more than just big time company analysts. I mean you have retail investors, you have industry analysts tracking what they did, but quite frankly, they’ve been doing great.
They’ve been trucking the competition. In fact, Mike Sievert came right out and said, call out AT&T for a statement that it made on its earnings call about having the lowest postpaid phone churn in the industry, yet their customers reporting that they’re 50% more likely to switch than Verizon or T-Mobile. Ulf Ewaldsson, the new CTO, also veteran of the Six Five Summit twice, made a little bit of a cameo appearance that I thought was nice. Another thing that they pointed out that, “Hey, we’re T-Mobile, we’re making all of this progress but we’re spending 60% less in advertising than Verizon.” I love the competitive flex here kind of turning up the contrast ratio.
There was one paragraph that I’m going to read verbatim about T-mobile For Business that Mike said. He was talking about churn and net adds. He said, “A perfect example of this. T-mobile For Business, where we just posted one of our highest ever phone net add quarter on Q1 with the lowest business phone churn in our history. We are profitably taking share with more business account net adds and more business phone net adds than Verizon in the quarter.” I love the – Dan, we were talking a little bit about competition related to Google Search and Bing. I mean T-Mobile is the absolute poster child for what happens when you have a lot of really good competition out there, and it can just churn it because they are giving Verizon and AT&T absolute headaches.
Daniel Newman: Yeah, you covered this one really, really well, Pat. So I’ll just add that I think T-Mobile continues to be the disruptor. And what I like about them most is even now that they’ve not really, they’re now the leader. They continue to play disruptor. And I think that’s really kind of a DNA thing. And it started with John Legere. It’s transferred to Mr. Sievert in his leadership role. And I think that’s why the company continues to compete. Some of the growth in things like high speed internet and beyond just phone handsets has been really good.
And I think one of the things that people really, if they are tracking the company, paying attention is that business opportunity. The T-Mobile For Business, you got lots of impact with 5G as it turns from this consumer handset thing to a business productivity connectivity and security tool. T-Mobile’s very well positioned, has a lot of spectrum, has done a good job of building a platform, and now there’s a lot of upside.
Author Information
Daniel is the CEO of The Futurum Group. Living his life at the intersection of people and technology, Daniel works with the world’s largest technology brands exploring Digital Transformation and how it is influencing the enterprise.
From the leading edge of AI to global technology policy, Daniel makes the connections between business, people and tech that are required for companies to benefit most from their technology investments. Daniel is a top 5 globally ranked industry analyst and his ideas are regularly cited or shared in television appearances by CNBC, Bloomberg, Wall Street Journal and hundreds of other sites around the world.
A 7x Best-Selling Author including his most recent book “Human/Machine.” Daniel is also a Forbes and MarketWatch (Dow Jones) contributor.
An MBA and Former Graduate Adjunct Faculty, Daniel is an Austin Texas transplant after 40 years in Chicago. His speaking takes him around the world each year as he shares his vision of the role technology will play in our future.
