Summary
The US mobile services revenues in Q2 2014 declined by $200M. The mobile data services revenue however continued to increase and is on track to exceed the $100B mark in mobile data services revenue. Data contribution to the overall revenues is now at 55%.
T-Mobile continued to outperform its competitors in net-adds. T-Mobile has almost recovered all its postpaid losses that started back in Q3 2009 and continued till Q1 2013. It should move into the positive territory next quarter. T-Mobile also crossed the 50M sub mark and is now within a striking distance of Sprint and could become the number 3 operator in the country before early 2015.
AT&T registered the lowest postpaid churn in its history at 0.86. For the industry buffs, the US record is held by Verizon which recorded the churn of 0.84 in Q2 2012. The world record is held by NTT DoCoMo for its churn of 0.44 in Q2 2010. In general, Japanese have the most loyal customer base in the world.
The net-adds in the US market is now primarily driven by connected devices (tablets and m2m). 84% of the net-adds in Q2 2014 were from the non-phone category. Tablets are driving the connected devices segment with 70% share. The net-effect has been that while the overall subscriber count has increased, there has been a negative impact on the ARPU which declined by 2.27%. All operators saw their ARPU decline.
Smartphone penetration increased to 70% and roughly 93% of the devices sold now are smartphones. Android beat iOS handedly in the quarter. For the first time, Verizon sold more iPhones than AT&T.
Your feedback is always welcome.
Chetan Sharma
We will be keeping a close eye on the trends in the wireless data sector in our blog, twitter feeds, future research reports, articles, and our annual thought-leadership summit – Mobile Future Forward. The next US Wireless Data Market update will be released in Nov 2014. The next Global Wireless Data Market update will be issued in Sept 2014.
Disclaimer: Some of the companies mentioned in this paper are our clients.
We will be discussing many of the ecosystem and technology issues, opportunities and challenges for the coming years in our annual mobile executive summit Mobile Future Forward on Sept 24th in Seattle. Some of the confirmed speakers are: Bill Ruh, VP, GE; Tim Campos, CIO, Facebook; Erik Moreno, SVP, Fox Networks; Glenn Lurie, President, AT&T; Steve Mills, CIO, Motorola Mobility; Hank Skorny, VP/GM, Intel; Dr. John Saw, CNO, Sprint; JD Howard, VP/GM, Lenovo; Dave Webb, CIO, Equifax; Dr. Hassan Ahmed, CEO, Affirmed Networks; Mark Fernandez, Managing Partner, Sierra Ventures; Ujjal Kohli, Founder, Rhythm NewMedia; Vik Kathuria, Global Chief Media Officer, Razorfish; Erin Kienast, SVP, Starcom Worldwide; Josh Will, Senior Category Manager, Best Buy; Steve Elfman, President, Sprint; Paul McNamara, VP, Ericsson; Matt Grob, EVP/CTO, Qualcomm; Julie Woods-Moss, CMO, CEO of Nextgen Business, Tata Communications; David Richter, VP, Uber; Paul Brody, VP & Mobile Practice Leader, IBM; Mathew Oommen, President, Reliance ; Andreas Gal, CTO, Mozilla; Chris Putnam, SVP, Synchronoss; Fareed Adib, Global Head of Telecom Partnerships, Google; Brian Angiolet, SVP – Consumer Product Innovation, Verizon; Sharath Dorbala, Head of Mobile Financial Services, Amdocs; Rajeev Tankha, Senior Director – Applications, Oracle; Andy Chu, VP – mCommerce, Sears Holdings; Philip Fasano, EVP and CIO, Kaiser Permanente; Erik Ekudden, SVP, Ericsson, and many more to come. We hope to see you there for the brainstorm.
