NEW YORK – T-Mobile USA added nearly a million cell-phone subscribers in the fourth quarter, but full-year results fell short of its parent company’s target.
T-Mobile USA said Monday it added 951,000 subscribers in October to December, giving it 28.7 million by the end of 2007. That’s up 14.6 percent from a year earlier.
Shareholders last year called for Deutsche Telekom AG, the parent of T-Mobile, to sell off the U.S. unit. Chief Executive Rene Obermann parried those suggestions in June, in part by saying the unit aimed to add 5 million subscribers by the end of the year. T-Mobile USA added 3.6 million subscribers in all of 2007.
However, T-Mobile USA’s growth outpaced the 9 percent growth in Deutsche Telekom’s European cell-phone operations from 2006 to 2007, including additions from last year’s acquisition of the carrier Orange in the Netherlands.
T-Mobile USA is a distant fourth in size among cell carriers in the U.S., behind AT&T Inc., Verizon Wireless and Sprint Nextel Corp. It’s doing considerably better than Sprint, which is losing subscribers, but T-Mobile USA has a larger proportion of prepaying subscribers, who are generally less profitable. In the fourth quarter, 77 percent of new customers were under contract, compared with 87 percent a year before.
The carrier will release financial results for the fourth quarter on Feb. 28.
T-Mobile’s German unit said has sold 70,000 of Apple Inc.’s iPhone since its debut in November. T-Mobile is the exclusive carrier in Germany, much like AT&T Inc. is the exclusive carrier in the United States. The German unit had nearly 36 million customers at the end of 2007.
In Britain, the company picked up 306,000 new customers, leaving it with a total of 17.3 million for the year, up 2.4 percent from last year.
Worldwide, the company said its number of mobile subscribers had risen 10.3 percent to 119.6 million for 2007.
Deutsche Telekom said it lost 537,000 fixed-line customers in the final three months of 2007, bringing its total number of land lines in the country to 31 million for the year, down 6.4 percent from 2006.
U.S.-listed shares of Deutsche Telekom fell 13 cents to $20.03 in morning trading.
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