AT&T’s Q2 2012: Revenues Of $31.6B, Earnings Of $0.66/Share, 61% Of Wireless Subscribers On Smartphones

AT&T has just released its Q2 2012 financial results — the telecom giant reported quarterly revenues of $31.6 billion (that’s up 0.3% year-over-year) and earnings of $0.66 per share (up a full 10% year-over-year). AT&T also reported operating income of $6.8 billion, a healthy jump from to the $6.1 billion it reported in the previous quarter.

As solid as the numbers seem, AT&T couldn’t completely beat analyst expectations. The company couldn’t quite match forecasted revenues of $31.7 billion, but easily beat expected earnings of $0.63.

Even better for AT&T is the fact that its wireless margins were “the highest ever.” That particular boost can be attributed partially to strong smartphone sales over the past three months. According to AT&T, its wireless business sold 5.1 million smartphones, meaning that a full 61.9% of AT&T postpaid subscribers are now own smartphones (and pay for smartphone data plans). Not too shabby considering that works out to a total of 69.6 million postpaid customers, each of whom accounts for roughly $64.93 of AT&T’s revenues.

Sadly for AT&T, Verizon had a much stronger quarter when it came to adding new postpaid wireless subscribers — the nation’s largest carrier reported a whopping 888,000 new contract customers earlier this month, compared to the 320,000 that AT&T managed to add to the fold. AT&T’s wireless data revenues also saw a considerable jump ($6.4 billion, up 6.8% from last year), but once again Verizon was able to slip ahead with $6.9 billion.

Turning to AT&T’s wireless business, things seem to be slowing down a bit — total wireline revenues were down 0.8% year-over-year to $14.9 billion, but operating income surged slightly to $2.1 billion. That said, there were still a few bright spots to be found. Total revenues from AT&T’s U-Verse services were up 38% over the year-ago quarter for one, and the company’s business data revenue ticked up 13.5% year-over-year.