T-Mobile Eyes Growth, Considers Tower Sale

From DailyTech: Despite introducing Android to the world with the G1, rolling out a "4G-like" high-speed HSPA+ network, and offering monthly service plans at lower rates than many of its competitors, T-Mobile USA's revenue and customer growth has remained flat over the last few years. Things have gotten so bad, Gizmodo included America's fourth-largest wireless carrier on its 2011 list of potentially doomed companies. But it won't go down without a fight.

The carrier, owned by German company Deutsche Telekom, has taken hits from all sides. With its position at the bottom of the Big Four -- Verizon, AT&T, and Sprint all ahead of it -- T-Mobile has lost customers to AT&T and the iPhone, as well as low-cost regional carriers like MetroPCS. Bloomberg reports that the company is readying plans to add $3 billion in sales by 2014.

“T-Mobile is now ready to turn the business around,” Philipp Humm, T-Mobile USA's CEO, said in a presentation to investors in New York last week. He said this would be achieved by offering customers the “best” data plan and the “best” fourth-generation network.

After seeing 40-percent growth between 2002 and 2008, the carrier saw only 3.2-percent growth in net new customers in 2009, Bloomberg reports. It's share of high-margin, post-paid customers also dropped from 89 percent in 2003 to 79 percent in '09. In that year, sales also fell 1.6 percent, to $21.5 billion.

Regardless, the carrier's U.S. branch is still a profitable of Deutsche Telekom, earning the company close to 25 percent of its sales. “In the U.S. we have $50 of revenues per user per month," Deutsche Telekom CEO Rene Obermann said. "That compares to $30 in Western Europe.”

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