At this point, nobody knows what impact the Verizon Wireless offering of the Apple iPhone will have on Verizon itself or AT&T. The sanguine view is that there will be some loss of iPhone customers on AT&T's network, but that such defections will not amount to more than 20 percent of the current iPhone base on AT&T. You can decide for yourself whether that is a significant problem or not.
Piper Jaffray analyst Christopher Larsen is among those who say the impact on AT&T will be manageable. For starters, most customers who want iPhones and are customers of AT&T already own them, so the incremental level of demand for AT&T already was somewhat limited. Of course, the argument is that there is a significant level of pent-up demand on the part of Verizon customers, but the iPhone impact there will be mostly about retention and a bit of incremental data services revenue.
But Hudson Square Research analyst Todd Rethemeier thinks the business impact on AT&T could be bigger. In 2010, AT&T had 11.1 million postpaid gross adds, with 8.6 million disconnects, resulting in 2.5 million net adds. About 37 percent of those gross adds, or 4.1 million, were on the iPhone, Rethemeier said.
If one assumes that AT&T loses 50 percent of the iPhone gross adds (AT&T and Verizon split the new iPhone sales evenly), this means that AT&T’s gross adds will drop by about 2.05 million (50 percent of the 4.1 million). That would suggest AT&T’s overall postpaid gross adds dip to nine million (11.1 million less the 2.05 million).
But it is net adds where the pain could come. The important number is the net adds figure. Rethemeier thinks net adds could drop to 400,000, down from 2.5 million. That is a big deal.
