T-Mobile beats Wall Street views as it gains new customers

T-Mobile, the country's No. 3 wireless carrier, on Wednesday said it continued to add new customers during the second quarter in a competitive wireless market.

The company won new customers even as rivals AT&T and Verizon are now also selling unlimited data plans, which many consumers prefer to plans that cap how much they can use. Sprint also offered a big promotion — a year's worth of free service for switching.

Most Americans already have a smartphone, so carriers are competing for them with discounts and promotions.

T-Mobile said it added 786,000 cellphone customers that pay a bill every month, the more lucrative kind of customer, up from the 646,000 it gained in the second quarter of 2016. Prepaid customers shrank to 94,000 from 476,000, however. A metric that tracks how many customers drop T-Mobile for another carrier fell.

The carrier raised its 2017 outlook for several financial metrics and reported that second-quarter net income more than doubled, to $581 million, or 67 cents per share. The average estimate of 17 analysts surveyed by Zacks Investment Research was for earnings of 36 cents per share.

The Bellevue, Washington-based company's revenue rose 10 percent to $10.15 billion in the period, or an adjusted $10.21 billion. Seventeen analysts surveyed by Zacks expected $9.85 billion.

T-Mobile US Inc. shares rose 2.9 percent to $63.79 in aftermarket trading. They closed Wednesday at $61.97, up 40 percent in the last 12 months.

_____

Elements of this story were generated by Automated Insights using data from Zacks Investment Research. Access a Zacks stock report on TMUS at https://www.zacks.com/ap/TMUS

_____

Keywords: T-Mobile, Earnings Report