On May 1st, we’re expecting T-Mobile to announce its Q1 financial results. And, while we don’t have any official figures on sales, subscriber additions, revenues or profits, everything is pointing towards it having been a very successful three-month period for Magenta.
In an interview with GeekWire, Mike Sievert claims that the carrier’s opposition know that T-Mo had a great quarter, and that they’ve been reacting accordingly: “I think our competitors know that we cleaned their clocks in Q1, and they’ve been busy responding.”
This response from the other guys is clearly an attempt to combat T-Mobile’s aggressive ‘Contract Freedom’ offer, in which it will pay off any early termination fees (up to $350) and let customers trade in their existing smartphones for up to $300 for switching to T-Mo. Arguably, the biggest direct response was from AT&T who started offering T-Mobile subscribers a cash amount to switch to the Death Star. More recently, Sprint kicked off a promotion directly copying T-Mobile’s Uncarrier 4.0 move, point-by-point.
And, if our inside information is anything to go by, T-Mobile just had its “best ever quarter”. Could that mean we’ll see an even greater number of net subscriber additions than the holiday quarter last year?
Whatever the figures T-Mobile announces on May 1st, we know for sure that the company is nowhere near done shaking up the industry. Sievert states “We want to make it clear, if anybody thought we were done, how wrong they were.” In a separate interview with CNET, John Legere teased that we can expect at least one major Uncarrier announcement this year (not including this week’s three changes.)
Of course, yesterday, T-Mo announced its new Simple Starter plan, offering 500MB of data, with unlimited minutes and texts for $40 per month. And this week’s not done yet. We know with certainty that two more days of announcements are incoming. We expect that one of those announcements will be heavy discounts on tablets and the opportunity to “buy now pay later” on EIP purchases.