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T-Mobile Gains 1.8 Million Customers in First Quarter as Revenue Slightly Exceeds Expectations

The company also raised its outlook for the number of core customers it expects to gain this year.

Asa Mathat

T-Mobile on Tuesday reported that it had added 1.8 million customers in the first quarter, including 1.1 million core postpaid customers under the T-Mobile brand.

T-Mobile

The carrier also said it expects to add between 3 million and 3.5 million such customers for 2015, up from its prior forecast of 2.2 million to 3.2 million additions.

On the financial side, T-Mobile said it lost $63 million, or 9 cents per share. That’s lower than a year ago, but a penny more than some analysts were expecting. T-Mobile took in 7.8 billion in revenue, up 13 percent year over year and just ahead of the $7.7 billion analysts had forecast.

T-Mobile said it expects to post profits for the remaining quarters of 2015 and for the full year.

And unlike Verizon and AT&T, which saw most of their gains come outside of the smartphone business, T-Mobile said one million of its postpaid additions last quarter were phone customers.

Both AT&T and Verizon saw their number of core smartphone subscribers drop last quarter amid intense price pressure from both Sprint and T-Mobile.

“We’ve had eight consecutive quarters with more than one million total net customer additions proving that customers want value,” CEO John Legere said in a statement. “We expect to once again capture all of the industry’s postpaid phone growth in Q1 and we’ve done it while delivering an all-time record low 1.3 percent churn.”

T-Mobile actually added fewer prepaid customers than it has in recent quarters, increasing its total by 73,000 in the quarter, amid what the company said was increased competition in that segment as well as a shift of some of its customers to the postpaid market.

Shares of T-Mobile traded off slightly in pre-market trading, changing hands recently at $34.06, down 25 cents or less than 1 percent.

This article originally appeared on Recode.net.

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