Customers line up at an Apple store in London.
Leon Neal/Getty Images
Apple
shares outperformed the market on a tough day for stocks.
AT&T
‘s earnings likely helped.
On Thursday morning, the No. 3 U.S. telecom company (ticker: T) reported a profit of 64 cents for the third quarter, beating the 62 cents analysts tracked by
FactSet
were expecting. Revenue of $30.4 billion was up 1% from a year earlier and was slightly higher than the $30.2 billion Wall Street expected.
Part of the boost to sales came from Apple (AAPL), late in the quarter.
CEO John Stankey said AT&T “saw the strongest iPhone preorders we’ve had in many years” in September. At the middle of last month, AT&T put Apple’s new iPhone 15 Pro and Pro Max in stores with a trade-in offer of up to $1,000 in credit. That meant shoppers could buy the two new models for nearly no cost if they committed to unlimited voice and data plans instead of the cheaper Value Plus plan.
T-Mobile
(TMUS) and
Verizon
(VZ) have their own offers for iPhones. MoffettNathanson founder and analyst Craig Moffett called the latest promotional deals from the Big Three “certainly very aggressive, but not meaningfully more so than last year.”
Stankey said he didn’t know whether the demand is unique to AT&T, but that the company saw customers upgrading to the new iPhones at a rate “higher than what we have seen in the last several quarters.”
AT&T’s suggestion that demand for iPhones is strong is good news for Apple’s stock. The device is Apple’s most important product, accounting for 48% of sales in the quarter that ended in June. The phone typically makes up about half of sales every quarter, so Apple needs to keep the new iterations appealing.
Investors likely paid attention to his comments. Apple’s stock closed down by 0.2% on Thursday, but it spent most of the day in positive territory, while the S&P index, off 0.9% at the close, has mostly been in the red.
AT&T’s stock was up 6.4%.
Write to Karishma Vanjani at [email protected]
Read the full article here