AAPL Apple Inc

   By Austen Hufford 
 

T-Mobile US Inc. (TMUS) continued to see subscriber growth as the launch of Apple Inc.'s (AAPL) latest iPhone likely encouraged some people to buy new plans.

T-Mobile reported a net gain of 891,000 branded postpaid accounts in the fourth quarter, bringing it to end the year with 38.04 million postpaid accounts.

T-Mobile said it ended the quarter with 72.59 million total customer accounts, which also includes customers who buy data and minutes before use on the company's MetroPCS brand and wholesale customers.

Apple released its iPhone X in early November with a starting price of $999 and features like an edge-to-edge display and a face-recognition unlocking system.

In November Sprint Corp. (S) and T-Mobile called off their merger plans, ending months of talks about a tie-up.

Competing with larger rivals, like Verizon(VZ) and AT&T (T), T-Mobile has also promoted its unlimited data plans, which include international data roaming in many countries. Last February Verizon brought back its own unlimited data plans.

T-Mobile said its churn rate for its postpaid accounts, a measure of how many customers didn't re-subscribe to its service, fell to 1.18% from 1.28% in the same quarter last year.

In all for the quarter, T-Mobile added 1.1 million total postpaid customers, down from 1.74 million in the same quarter last year. The reading was up from 1.04 million in the third quarter.

The carrier said in December that it is acquiring a streaming-video startup and will launch its own paid-television service, becoming the latest company to jump into the increasingly crowded online-video market. The company has also been running a promotion that gives some new unlimited subscribers Netflix accounts.

The company also said that it had bought about $444 million worth of its own shares through a repurchase program and still had $1.1 billion remaining in the authorization as of Dec. 31.

T-Mobile also said that its majority shareholder, Deutsche Telekom AG (DTEGY), is considering plans to purchase additional shares of the company, which it said would likely take place this year.

Write to Austen Hufford at Austen.Hufford@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

January 09, 2018 09:18 ET (14:18 GMT)

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