Telecom giant and WarnerMedia parent AT&T, led by CEO John Stankey, disclosed Friday that it lost 473,000 premium video subscribers during the second quarter.
It shared the preliminary figures for its DirecTV, AT&T TV and U-verse TV services in a regulatory filing related to its debt.
Wells Fargo analyst Steve Cahall, in a first reaction, called the figures “not so bad,” noting that the FactSet consensus had called for a loss of 508,000 customers. “This marks the best quarterly loss for AT&T since the fourth quarter of 2018 and compares to (a loss of) 887,000 in the second quarter of 2020 and 620,000 in the first quarter 2021.”
And the Wall Street expert added: “In the prior trailing four quarters, AT&T video sub loss averaged 679,000.”
AT&T in its filing said the latest figures marked “an improvement of 47 percent” from the aggregate customer loss for the corresponding quarter of 2020. It ended June with a premium video subscriber base of 15.4 million.
“DirecTV churn, which is calculated by dividing the aggregate number of subscribers who disconnected service during a month by the average number of subscribers in that month, showed strong momentum in the second quarter of 2021,” the telecom giant also noted in its filing. “The DirecTV churn for the second quarter of 2021 was 1.87 percent, an improvement of 22 percent” from 2.42 percent for the comparable quarter of 2020.
