Reporting its third quarter fiscal results, T-Mobile U.S. parent Deutsche Telekom at least partially blamed the company’s lack of the iPhone for its struggles to keep contract customers.
The Wall Street Journal reports that it cost T-Mobile in the U.S. $87 to keep an existing subscriber, up from $58 the year-ago quarter, while it paid out an average of $134 to acquire a new customer, up from $116 a year earlier.
Still, the company lost 60,000 contract customers during the period, which Deutsche Telekom CEO Rene Obermann blamed on the iPhone. “Consumers like T-Mobile but they also want to have the iPhone,” which the company has no chance of getting in the short term, he said.
