AT&T today announced results for second quarter of 2008 and said that it sold almost twice the number of iPhones in first 12 days as it did with the original iPhone launch a year ago. AT&T also noted that since the launch of original iPhone last year the total number of smartphone owners on its network has more than doubled. In June 2007 only 8 percent of its customers were smartphone owners and the number has risen to 18 percent by June 2008. Neither AT&T nor Apple has announced the number of iPhone 3Gs sold in US since launch on July 11th 2008, but analysts suggest the number will be more than 500,000 so far. Some analysts believe that the number will cross one million within 30 days.
The carrier added 1.3 million new customers bring the total number of wireless customers to 72.9 million. This basically dismisses Verizon’s claim that it has more wireless customers (68.7 million) than any other wireless brand in the US. AT&T topped Verizon by a margin of 4.2 million customers. AT&T says it has reduced churn (new customers replacing old customers) to an all-time low of 1.1 percent and U-Verse is also seeing strong growth. Total revenue increased 4.7 percent year-over-year to 30.9 billion, while operating income came at 35 percent to $6.6 billion.