AT&T may have overshadowed T-Mobile's earnings announcement, but the Un-carrier had the last laugh.
T-Mobile was forced to reschedule its third-quarter earnings conference call on Monday after AT&T abruptly scheduled its own call to discuss its earnings results, which it released Saturday right after announcing an $85.4 billion deal to acquire Time Warner.
But while AT&T promised a revolution in delivering video with Time Warner, T-Mobile kept chugging away at the nuts and bolts of the core wireless business. The company said Monday it added a net 851,000 new post-paid phone customers, or people who pay at the end of the month who tend to stick around longer. It's one of the primary metrics for growth.
AT&T lost 289,000 such customers in the period. Verizon last week said it lost 36,000 customers. Sprint, the other winner, said last week it added 347,000 customers.
The results, in which T-Mobile once again added more customers than the rest of the national players combined, underscore the gap in which T-Mobile has been able to effectively win over customers. The company introduced a new, cheaper unlimited plan in August. And while not everyone liked the change, it was enough to drive customers to sign up. Likewise, its freebie program, T-Mobile Tuesdays, continues to draw buzz since its summer debut. T-Mobile was also out the gate early with a free iPhone offer, letting you trade an older iPhone for a new iPhone 7 for free.
T-Mobile added 684,000 net new prepaid customers in the period. In total, it added 2 million net new customers.
The carrier posted a profit of $366 million, or 42 cents a share, compared with a year-earlier profit of $138 million, or 15 cents a share. Stripping out a one-time gain from its spectrum assets, the company earned 27 cents a share.
Revenue rose 17.8 percent year over year to $9.2 billion.
Analysts, on average, forecast earnings of 23 cents a share and revenue of $9.42 billion, according to Yahoo Finance.