I’ve been gathering data on the major US cable, satellite and telecoms providers for the last few weeks, as they’ve been reporting earnings. This post compares their consumer financials – revenues, profits, ARPU, as well as their subscriber growth (shrinkage), and draws conclusions about the state of the market and prospects of individual players. It also provides some analysis of the likely impact of the announced merger between Comcast and Time Warner Cable and the rumored merger between AT&T and DirecTV.
A full set of diagrams and charts in addition to analysis is available in this slide deck on SlideShare (which is also embedded below).
This analysis is based on the data from US wireless operators’ earnings for Q1 2014. You can see a set of data published previously here, or a fuller set of data on Slideshare here. The deck is also embedded below:
Scale
The US wireless market continues to be a game of four sets of players: AT&T and Verizon, Sprint and T-Mobile, Tracfone, and everyone else. The “everyone else” set is thinning out rapidly as more and more of the smaller regional carriers are snapped up by the bigger carriers, including Leap and MetroPCS in the last few months. Tracfone is included in the analysis here because it’s significant in scale, with as many prepaid subscribers as T-Mobile has postpaid subscribers, but of course its business model is entirely different as an MVNO. It is therefore excluded from a number of the comparisons below, either because they’re not meaningful or because Tracfone provides only limited data, as a subsidiary of America Movil. The revenues and total subscribers charts below are good illustrations of the scale differences between the three groups we’ll look at: Continue reading →
A blog about consumer technology from Jackdaw Research