Verizon (VZ) reported earnings today, checking in with $24.8B in revenues and its usual billions of dollars of cashflow. Adjusted EPS of $0.66 seems to have been what the market was expecting. While the company didn’t discuss the effects of the overall economy directly in their press release, no doubt they will say more at their CC later this morning. But for now, if we didn’t already know the world was ending, it sure wouldn’t be apparent from Verizon’s earnings.
Wireless, of course, is the engine that drives the company right now, reaching 70.8M subscribers this quarter with revenues of $12.7B and with data revenues up 42% over last year. Wireline revenues declined slightly as they churn off landlines. DSL subscribers were down 96,000, but of course most of these migrated to FIOS.
Verizon FIOS gained 233,000 new customers, of whom apparently 225,000 bought TV service as part of the bundle. These uptake numbers are definitely starting to become relevant, and it can’t really be denied that Verizon is already a real player in the TV space. After all, with 1.6M customers using their service they are already approaching the top 5 cable level. And the growth will only accelerate for a while to come. FIOS doesn’t look so expensive nowadays, does it?
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Categories: Financials · Internet Backbones
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I Got my FIOS TV and it just as good or better than TWC.
Rob, Thanks for your work.
I remember reading an article recently that talked about the churn in DSL being a flight to cable. At the time I commented that I did not see this as being accurate but was poo poo’ d by the cable camp. I have historically been negative on the BOC/ILEC side but with the, what I see, success of VZ’s PON solution for FTTP, I do not think they can be ignored. VZ states that they are targeting 10 million subscribers by 2010. I think this is quite possible. Cable looks to Docsis 3 to compete with VZ’s triple play into the residence. If you actually compare FiOS to your favorite cable solution (I’m not saying PON is the best optical solution.. but for VZ’s it make sense) you will likely see that VZ’s solution is superior to what cable is providing at this time. Granted, I have not seen Comcast’s 50 mbit/sec solution, but when bandwidth is shared you will not see sustained rates of data, and the days of only geeks noticing this during mega dowload sessions is fast becoming a thing of the past.