T-Mobile and Sprint are in a tight race for the nation’s third-largest carrier.
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(TMUS) are up 68 cents, or 1.8%, at $39.15, after the company this morning said it added 2 million customers during the June quarter, a 41% increase from the year-earlier period. When Cramer asked if T-Mobile had passed Sprint (S) on customer count, he said, “We’ve either passed them, or we’re passing them”. A series of promotions and improvements to the Sprint network have fueled recent customer additions. The addition brings T-Mobile to a total of 58.9 million customers. T-Mobile has been especially successful in adding phone subscribers, which tend to be more lucrative than accounts set up by tablet owners.
T-Mobile CEO John Legere had promised to eclipse Sprint by the end of past year, but the Overland Park, Kansas-based carrier has hung on to its lead. Sprint has defended the accounting practice, noting that its policy is not to remove a customer from its records until a resale partner notifies it.
Shares, inactive premarket, have gained 43% this year. Out of the 1 million, 760,000 were phone customers.
Sprint, which needs to grow by about 1.77 million subscribers to keep ahead of T-Mobile, had added 1.2 million subscribers in the first quarter of this year.
T-Mobile also added 178,000 branded prepaid customers, largely through its MetroPCS arm. T-Mobile United States also noted 175,000 branded prepaid connections migrated to postpaid options, which was down sequentially.
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T-Mobile USA entered Q2 as officially the market’s No. 4 carrier just behind Sprint, though those numbers have been called into question.
