T Mobile US : Q1 2026 Transcript

Published: 2026-04-28 23:44:07 ET TMUS

Published on 04/28/2026 at 11:44 pm EDT

LSEG STREETEVENTS

EDITED TRANSCRIPT

TMUS.OQ - Q1 2026 T-Mobile US Inc Earnings Call

EVENT DATE/TIME: APRIL 28, 2026 / 8:30PM GMT

OVERVIEW:

Company Summary

‌(Operator Instructions) After today's presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. (Operator Instructions) You may also submit a question via X by sending a post to @T-MobileIR or @Srinigopalan using number TGTM-US. I would now like to turn the conference over to Cathy Yao, Senior Vice President of Investor Relations for T-Mobile US. Please go ahead.

Good afternoon, and welcome to T-Mobile's First Quarter 2026 Earnings Call. Joining me on our call today are Srinivasan Gopalan, our President and CEO; Peter Osvaldik, our CFO; as well as other members of the leadership team.

During this call, we will make forward-looking statements, which involve risks and uncertainties that may cause actual results to differ materially. We encourage you to review the risk factors set forth in our SEC filings. Our earnings release, investor fact book, and other documents related to our results, as well as reconciliations between GAAP and non-GAAP results discussed on this call, can be found on our Investor Relations website. With that, let me now turn it over to Srini.

Thanks, Cathy, and good afternoon, everyone. We're here in Bellevue today, ready to discuss another extraordinary quarter for T-Mobile. This quarter is a powerful demonstration that the strategy we outlined for you in February is working.

Our strategy is driven by widening differentiation-providing customers with the best network, best value, and best experience all in the same place so that they don't need to make trade-offs anymore. We made strong progress on this strategy this quarter, and nothing demonstrates this more succinctly than our NPS score, an industry-leading 45, over 20% higher than that of our next closest competitor.

This widening differentiation gives us access to unprecedented growth opportunities, and our industry-leading growth this quarter is a testament to this. One of the largest of these growth opportunities is the 20 million-plus families and businesses who are network seekers not currently with T-Mobile.

This is an opportunity with a lot of runway and one where we're making great progress. In fact, this quarter, amongst recent switchers who chose to come to T-Mobile from another carrier, the highest percentage ever said they chose us for one reason: network quality. Similarly, across multiple third-party surveys like HarrisX and feedback from the analyst community, we've seen a strong improvement in the perception of our network. That's what led us once again to grow our share of postpaid households in each of our cohorts in the top 100 cities. In smaller markets and rural areas, where we have only 24% share of households, we continue to accelerate and capture more switching share, with word-of-mouth driving strong momentum.

In addition to our tremendous momentum in consumer across network seekers and other underpenetrated cohorts, our low share in T-Mobile for Business also continues to give us substantial growth runway. This quarter, we continued to capture share with our network superiority-led value proposition in T-Mobile for Business.

Our industry-leading nationwide 5G Advanced network continues to allow us to drive TAM creation with advanced network solutions and leverage that as a thoughtful cross-sell opportunity into traditional voice and broadband offerings. One example of our innovation in action is Major League Baseball's recent rollout of our automated ball-strike system, which uses the T-Mobile network to allow challenges to umpire calls.

Let's now turn to broadband. For yet another quarter, we were the fastest-growing ISP in America, adding over 0.5 million total broadband net additions, with 5G broadband net adds accelerating year-over-year. 5G broadband continues to lead the industry in terms of customer experience, topping J.D. Power, Forbes, CNET Consumer Reports, and OpenSignal, just to name a few.

Our 5G broadband speeds also continue to lead the peer group at over 50% faster than the next closest competitor. Fiber is tracking great, leveraging the T-Mobile brand to draw strong interest. I'm excited about our announcement earlier today that we're entering into two additional JVs with leading infrastructure partners to acquire GoNetspeed, Greenlight Networks, and i3 Broadband as part of our returns-focused, capital-efficient approach.

Every piece of the business I've talked about so far helped drive our tremendous postpaid net account additions of 217,000 in Q1, which was up 6% year-over-year. But in addition to volume growth, as I said in February, we also have a double-digit advantage in back-book pricing over our leading competitors.

In Q1, that translated to a really strong postpaid ARPA growth of 3.9%, a powerful proof point that our unique and durable value proposition is resonating as we deepen relationships with customers. T-Ads and financial services-smart and thoughtful adjacencies that piggyback off the success and scale of our brand and ecosystem-are also delivering strong incremental growth.

Now, even as we capitalize on our differentiation to drive growth, we consciously double down on the sources of this differentiation across best network, best value, and best customer experience. Let's start with the network. We're continuing to push the envelope of what's possible. We're excited to be rolling out live translation on data soon, our first network-native AI application that we demoed for you at our February event.

Live translation uses language learning models embedded into our core to translate your voice into one of 80 different languages anywhere in the world. All you need is one connected T-Mobile phone. Importantly, this is just the initial step in building AI capabilities directly into our network core. Longer term, we see a world where our network becomes the connective tissue for physical AI and accommodates inferencing at the edge.

As a step toward this, we're delighted to share today that we're connecting our 5G Advanced network to Figure AI's F3 humanoid robots, enabling seamless and reliable connectivity from the moment they power on. This partnership, among others, will allow us to explore how the T-Mobile 5G Advanced network and its capabilities, including assets like the network edge, can support the broader evolution of physical AI.

This is an important stepping stone toward building an even more capable network of the future with 6G. On value leadership, which we guard zealously, we further strengthened our credentials with the rollout of our Better Value plan earlier this year, which offers access to our premium wireless experience to even more customers at a great value.

Our other key differentiator is our customer experience. T-Life continues to drive digital interactions, with about 25 million monthly active users engaging with the app multiple times a month. T-Life will also serve as the unified platform to support growth into considered adjacencies like financial services and advertising.

In retail, we're well underway in our journey toward more experience-led stores, with several hundred already up and running. Our experience stores see higher premium mix and higher NPS scores than our traditional outlets. Over time, our mix shift will lead to fewer doors but more meaningful customer experiences.

So even as our differentiation drives industry-leading growth, we continue to feed and strengthen it so that the gap to the competition only widens further. Pulling all this together, this is what drives the industry-leading financial growth we've delivered yet again across all key metrics in Q1.

Our postpaid service revenue grew 15% year-over-year. Total service revenue grew 11%, a rate that's more than four times that of our next closest competitor. Our core adjusted EBITDA grew an industry-leading 12% year-over-year, all while continuing to deliver industry-leading free cash flow margins of 24%. Alongside this incredible financial growth, we returned $6 billion to shareholders in the form of dividends and share buybacks.

‌I'll end by saying our results speak for themselves. The unique differentiation we have as a carrier continues to lead to best-in-class results. Just look at our NPS scores. The best part of all of this is this team's hunger and the incredible passion our people have to truly delight customers, which means we're only at the beginning.

Okay, Peter, over to you to provide an exciting update on our guidance.

Thanks, Srini. As you can see, our growing differentiation not only drove a strong start to the year, but also gives us the confidence to increase our guidance across multiple fronts.

Starting with accounts, we are raising our expectation for total postpaid net account additions to be between 950,000 and 1.05 million on the strength of the underlying momentum in the business.

Turning to service revenues, we continue to expect to deliver full-year service revenue of approximately $77 billion, representing 8% growth, with Q2 expectations of approximately $19 billion, or up 9% year-over-year. As part of that service revenue growth, we continue to expect strong postpaid ARPA growth of between 2.5% and 3% for the full year.

We are also raising our full-year core adjusted EBITDA guidance, which is now expected to be between $37.1 billion and $37.5 billion, an increase of $100 million at the lower end of the range. As part of that, we expect Q2 core adjusted EBITDA of approximately $9.4 billion, up 10% year-over-year.

Our expectation for full-year 2026 cash CapEx remains unchanged at approximately $10 billion as we continue to invest to further differentiate the network. We now expect adjusted free cash flow to be between $18.1 billion and $18.7 billion for the full year, also an increase of $100 million at the lower end of the range.

Finally, last week we announced that we are increasing our 2026 stockholder return authorization by up to $3.6 billion to a total authorization of up to $18.2 billion. As always, we will continue to follow our disciplined capital allocation philosophy.

To sum it all up, we continue to see strong momentum in the business and cannot be more excited for the future. With that, I'll now turn the call back to Cathy to begin the Q&A.

Thanks, Peter. All right, let's get to your questions. (Operator Instructions) We will start with a question on the phone. Operator, first question, please.

Craig Moffett, MoffettNathanson.

Hi, thank you. Let me start with the reports that you're considering a merger with Deutsche Telekom. Can you talk about the logic behind that and the logistics? Would that require a vote of the majority of the minority among Board members as independents, and exactly how would that work? And would there be any premium for U.S. shareholders?

Thanks, Craig. Let me pick that up. As a matter of policy, we don't comment on market rumors or speculation, nor is there anything specific to comment on anyway. However, the article has raised a lot of questions inbound on governance.

We've looked into the governance, and what I've been told is that, hypothetically, if someone were ever to consider such a transaction reported in the article, that would specifically require a separate approval process by disinterested shareholders, what many of you refer to as a majority of the minority.

Sam McHugh, BNP.

consent of LSEG. 'LSEG' and the LSEG logo are registered trademarks of LSEG and its affiliated companies.

Disclaimer

T-Mobile US Inc. published this content on April 29, 2026, and is solely responsible for the information contained herein. Distributed via Public Technologies (PUBT), unedited and unaltered, on April 29, 2026 at 03:43 UTC.