Verizon Reports 9.1 Percent Mobile Revenue Growth





Revenue at Verizon Wireless rose 9.1 percent year-over-year to $17.7 billion in the third quarter, company officials said Friday. Growth was driven by Web and e-mail services, which increased 36 percent, to $3.7 billion.

Verizon Wireless added more than 1.3 million total connections and customer Relevant Products/Services churn was a market-leading low of 0.94 percent — a 13 basis point improvement over the same quarter last year. At the end of September, Verizon had 107.7 million total connections — a 6.5 percent year-over-year rise.

Verizon sold 5.6 million smartphones, with smartphones representing 60 percent of the company’s total postpaid phone sales. Still, Verizon executives noted that a significant number of Verizon customers had delayed their upgrade decisions during the quarter in expectation of the October launch of Apple’s iPhone 4S.

“We are geared up for an even better fourth quarter, with new smartphones, tablets and data Relevant Products/Services devices coming to market,” said Verizon CEO Lowell McAdam.


The iPhone Boom Ahead

Piper Jaffray expressed confidence last week that Apple’s iPhone 4S had achieved the momentum to meet or exceed the financial firm’s 25-million-unit global estimate for the fourth quarter. The investment firm’s analysts Gene Munster and Andrew Murphy believe many Verizon subscribers have been waiting for the iPhone 4S.

“Of those Verizon subscribers who do not have an iPhone but plan to buy an iPhone next, 74 percent were specifically waiting for the next iPhone,” according to a recent Piper Jaffray survey. The investment firm’s analysts are modeling for Verizon customers to buy 7.3 million iPhone models in the final calendar quarter of this year.

“As far as the iPhone 4S goes, we’re extremely pleased with our sales,” Verizon CFO Francis Shammo said during a conference call with financial analysts Friday. “We ran out the first day,” he reported, “and we continue to be in backlog from the first 24 hours.”

The iPhone 4S numbers seen so far are consistent with the old subscriber vs. new subscriber mix that Verizon has seen in prior quarters. According to Shammo, 20 percent of the wireless Relevant Products/Services carrier’s iPhone customers are new to Verizon, with the remaining 80 percent representing subscriber upgrades.

“We feel that third-quarter performance will continue into our fourth-quarter performance,” Shammo said.


A Strategic Advantage

Verizon said the wireless carrier’s rollout of high-speed LTE services across the United States is going well. “With additional markets planned in November and December, we are actually ahead of schedule and have already exceeded our year-end target of 185 million PoPs,” Shammo told financial analysts.

“We sold a total of 1.4 million 4G Relevant Products/Services LTE devices in the quarter,” Shammo said. “Just over 50 percent of these were smartphones and the rest were Internet data devices.”

Verizon’s early commitment to LTE technology gives the carrier a strategic advantage over rivals ATT Relevant Products/Services and Sprint, which are still in the early stages of their respective LTE deployments.

“If you look at our Internet devices, about 95 percent are now 4G LTE,” Shammo said. In other words Verizon has succeeded in moving many of its top data-hungry customers off of its 3G Relevant Products/Services network Relevant Products/Services and on to high-speed LTE, “which obviously frees up spectrum and reduces our capital expense,” Shammo said.

 

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Article source: http://business.newsfactor.com/news/Verizon-Wireless-Revenue-Up--9-1-/story.xhtml?story_id=113009G9W7RJ

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