T-Mobile USA CEO John Legere said to expect a 3 to 5 percent growth in revenue over five years following the company’s proposed merger with MetroPCS. T-Mobile USA Chief Technology Officer Neville Ray added that the company was seeing 100,000 unlocked iPhones ported over per month from AT&T to T-Mobile’s network, raising the total number of unlocked iPhones running on its network to 1.9 million.
The executives made the comments during a talk at the Citi investor conference Tuesday, where they were joined by Braxton Carter, CFO for MetroPCS.
Ray cited T-Mobile and AT&T’s network compatibility for creating ease of bringing over unlocked phones, which he said experienced better service on T-Mobile’s refarmed 1900 PCS.
Carter said he projects 7 to 10 percent growth in EBITDA as a result of the merger. He hopes the acquisition will move to shareholder voting by the end of February, early March, with a possible closing date coming April 1.
Answering questions about MetroPCS’s recently reported large loss in subscribers, Carter didn’t sound worried. He explained it didn’t make sense to drive growth to its CDMA network, as the company’s LTE network is the future, with that customer segment exhibiting lower churn because the user experience is better on the next-generation network. Beyond that, MetroPCS’s CDMA network would be refarmed for LTE after the merger.
Legere focused on T-Mobile’s value plans and called it “asinine” to lock people into device for two years on traditional plans, touting the flexibility of T-Mobile’s value plans.
“Do AT&T execs make their kids wait two years to open their Christmas gifts,” asked one of the slides accompanying Legere’s presentation.
Legere, who called his company the “un-carrier,” made it clear he didn’t necessarily want to attack AT&T, but rather he was looking to attack “the stupidity of how we serve customers.”