AT&T adds customers, but drops profits 15% in Q2

AT&T’s second quarter profits fell far short of last year’s, coming in at $3.2 billion. That’s 15 percent off from last year’s second quarter, when AT&T brought in $3.8 billion.

The company’s revenue stayed the same as last year, at $30.7 billion, but the makeup of that 30 billion has changed a lot. Home and business customers continue to abandon landlines in favor of mobile phones and Internet telephony.

AT&T’s wireless division reported 10% higher sales totaling $13.2 billion, with some 1.4 million new customers, many lured by AT&T’s exclusive contract with Apple to sell and service iPhones. But the iPhone deal is both good and bad for profits. AT&T subsidizes iPhones heavily, as much as $450 per phone by some outsider estimates. iPhone owners’ heavy data use has also placed a burden on the company’s infrastructure, eating up two to four times as much data traffic as other phone owners.

AT&T also signed up 209,000 new broadband customers, both through DSL and via wireless cards for their laptops, and 248,000 Internet video customers for its U-Verse TV service.