Newsletter
Its earnings week. So it’s time to find out how well, or not so well, the US carriers did in the third quarter. We’ve heard a lot of projections from analysts in the past few weeks, but now we’re getting the real numbers. Verizon is first out of the gate, announcing their numbers this morning for the third quarter (which ran from July-September) and the company did rather well. Bringing in $33.2 billion in revenue. Now keep in mind these numbers are just for the wireless sector, not the entire Company. The $33.2 billion in revenue that was brought in was a 5% increase compared to the third quarter in 2014. Net income earnings was $4.171 billion or about $1.04 a share, that was also up 9.9% year-over-year.
As far as customers go, the company added 1.3 million new customers in the quarter, bringing their total to 110.8 million retail connections. That is up by 4.3% compared to the same period last year. They also have 105 million retail postpaid connections, which brings it a 4.9% increase year-over-year. The company also added around 889,000 4G smartphones to their postpaid customer base, postpaid phone net adds totaled 430,000. Smartphone net adds were 694,000 which Verizon states as being partially offset due to the basic phones declining. Tablet net adds were around 818,000 for the quarter while net prepaid devices declined by 80,000.
In this quarter, Verizon did also get rid of their contracts and moved to installment plans. Verizon touts that 5.6 million phones were activated on a device installment plan. Bringing their total to 19 million for payment plans on their network. That’s about 22% of their entire customer base. Including that number, about a third of Verizon customers are on unsubsidized pricing. Verizon is also touting that about 7% of Verizon’s retail postpaid base upgraded to a new device in the third quarter. Additionally, around 76% of the retail postpaid connections are on 4G LTE. With their 4G LTE network handling about 89% of the total wireless data traffic for the quarter. That’s an increase of around 75% in network data megabytes compared to last year.
Probably the most important stat here is that Verizon’s churn rate was 0.93, the lowest it’s been in quite some time. So it appears either less people are leaving big red, or more people are coming in. Of course it could be a bit of both. Nevertheless, it was a pretty good quarter for Verizon.