With all the hoopla over buying out Vodafone’s interest in Verizon Wireless, the company’s Q1 earnings report kind of snuck up on us. Not that it matters though, because when you’re big enough the surprises tend to cancel each other out. With earnings per share of $0.68, Verizon (NYSE:VZ, news, filings) beat analyst estimates by $0.02, while revenues were generally in-line.
On the wireless front, revenues were up 8.6% while EBITDA margins rose to 50.4%. They added 677K net postpaid subscribers, reaching 98.9M total retail connections. Meanwhile, their LTE service is now available to 287M people across 491 markets in the US. You can see why they would like to bump Vodafone off out of the hammock.
As usual, the wireline story is more mixed. They added 188K FIOS customers, reaching 38.2% penetration. But the top line is still going down, albeit slower – now at $9.83B for the first quarter after $9.95B last year. Global Wholesale was down 7.2%, and Global Enterprise was down 2.6%.
All in all, few surprises – and no big red flags for the overall economic environment to kick off earnings season.
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Categories: Financials · ILECs, PTTs · Wireless
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Sounds like good reported earnings for Verizon in Q1