T-Mobile adds 4.4 million new subscribers in 2013
The company adds more than a million customers in the fourth quarter of 2013, as a result of its UnCarrier strategy. And it says it added nearly four and a half million new subscribers to its service for the year.
There's no question now that 2013 was a historic year for T-Mobile. The company reported Wednesday that it added a total of 4.4 million new subscribers to its network in all of 2013, turning around a business that had steadily been losing customers.
Company CEO John Legere reported an early update on T-Mobile's fourth-quarter subscriber growth during the company's press conference at the Consumer Electronics Show. Legere said that for the fourth quarter, T-Mobile added a total of 1.6 million new subscribers, a huge change from a year ago when it lost 515,000 postpaid customers.
"The fourth quarter was a complete knockout," Legere said. "That's three quarters in a row above 1 million subscribers."
Legere added that of the total number of new customers, 869,000 were postpaid customers, and about 112,000 were prepaid customers. He also said a significant number of customers switched to T-Mobile from other carriers, such as AT&T and Sprint.
T-Mobile has seen a turnaround in 2013, in large part because of the company's new UnCarrier strategy, which has resulted in T-Mobile getting rid of service contracts and phone subsidies, adding a new upgrade program, offering free international data roaming, and giving away 200MB of free data for tablet customers. Legere said UnCarrier is all about changing the industry. And he said he hopes his competitors will change too.
"We're either going to take over the whole industry, or those bastards will change," he said. "Either way, we'll continue to grow."
Update, 1:10 pm PT: Adds more detail from the press conference.