Offers with unlimited voice and data volume attracted almost twice as many users to AT&T in the second quarter as expected.

"Our significant investments in 5G and fiber are driving sustained growth in large parts of our business," said CEO John Stankey during a conference call to announce the company's results on Wednesday. As a result, AT&T shares rose by up to 4.8 percent on Wall Street, the sharpest rise since around nine months ago.

According to the figures, the US telecommunications group increased the number of contract customers by 419,000, whereas analysts had expected just under 285,000. Premium products had already brought the company a surprisingly large number of new customers in the previous quarter. AT&T's offers are usually cheaper than those of its competitors Verizon and T-Mobile.

This is one reason for the loyalty of many customers. According to further information, the churn rate was 0.7 percent. This is the second-lowest figure in a second quarter for the company. As a result, free cash flow, which is used as an indicator for the dividend amount, rose by nine percent to 4.6 billion dollars. However, as with rival Verizon, customers were hesitant to switch to newer generations of smartphones, pushing AT&T's revenue down by eight percent to 29.8 billion dollars. Analysts had hoped for 29.9 billion dollars.

HACKER ATTACK AND TECHNICAL GLITCH

The reporting period was overshadowed by a hacker attack. According to AT&T, the attackers captured connection data from 109 million customers. However, these were only log files. Information about the content of calls or text messages was not leaked.

A few days ago, the US regulator FCC also took stock of the widespread outage of the AT&T mobile network in February. At that time, 92 million calls could not be made and 25,000 calls to the emergency number 911 were not possible. The authorities could punish this with a fine.

(Report by Harshita Mary Varghese; written by Hakan Ersen. Edited by Philipp Krach. If you have any questions, please contact our editorial team at berlin.newsroom@thomsonreuters.com (for politics and the economy) or frankfurt.newsroom@thomsonreuters.com (for companies and markets).)