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AT&T shares jump as subscriber growth tops analyst expectations



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A pedestrian walks in front of an AT&T location in New York.Scott Mlyn | CNBCAT&T shares jumped on Wednesday after the carrier reported fourth-quarter subscriber growth that exceeded Wall Street’s estimates, shrugging off its rivals’ lower pricing strategies.The U.S. phone service provider added 217 million total subscribers across all of its divisions for the fourth quarter, beating StreetAccount estimates of 215 million. New phone subscribers specifically, however, missed analyst expectations, coming in at 656,000 net adds, versus an estimate of 678,400, according to StreetAccount.Shares of AT&T were up 5%, trading at $20 per share following the Wednesday earnings announcement.The company has continued to discount the idea that the phone carrier industry is in a pricing war.”I don’t submit to the view that there’s a race to the bottom going on. I actually think the industry is doing quite well,” CEO John Stankey said in an interview on CNBC’s “Squawk on the Street.”T-Mobile has touted its ongoing “Price Lock,” which promises that the company won’t hike monthly phone rates in response to inflation, though it raised millions of customers’ other fees in early 2022, according to a report from Bloomberg. The carrier has called out Verizon and AT&T for raising rates.That marketing campaign triggered speculation about whether the competing service providers would adjust their pricing strategies in order to snag more subscribers. T-Mobile …

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