Verizon Wireless and AT&T Claim Strong Q4 Ahead of Earnings Reports
Verizon Wireless and AT&T say they had a record-breaking Q4, with both releasing some information on their performance ahead of official quarterly earnings announcements set for later this month. Verizon Communications, which owns a majority of Verizon Wireless, will release its full Q4 earnings Jan. 22; AT&T plans to release its full results Jan. 24.
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Verizon Wireless had its best Q4 ever in 2012, with the company adding a net 2.1 million subscriptions, Verizon Communications CEO Lowell McAdam said Monday during a presentation at the Citigroup investor conference, which was also webcast. About 30 percent of its net adds were new to Verizon Wireless, which McAdam said was made possible in part by the carrier’s “Share Everything” shared data plans. “This has worked out, frankly, better than we had hoped and so we are attracting a lot of customers as a result of our offers,” he said.
Smartphone sales remained strong, accounting for 85 percent of the carrier’s total device sales, McAdam said. Since all of the carrier’s latest device offerings operate on LTE, those sales resulted in the percentage of its subscribers using LTE rising to 23 percent, up from 16 percent in Q3, he said. McAdam was expected to emphasize the virtues of LTE during a speech late Tuesday after our deadline at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell and Ford Chief Technology Officer Paul Mascarenas were expected to join McAdam during his speech to highlight LTE applications.
Contrary to some press reports, Verizon is not interested in buying the U.K.’s Vodafone, McAdam said. But Verizon remains “ready” to buy Vodafone’s 45 percent stake in Verizon Wireless, he said. Verizon has remained open to that possibility for years, and McAdam said he doesn’t “feel any great urgency to do anything preemptive here. But as Vodafone continues to evaluate their ecosystem and their needs, and we evaluate ours, it may come up. But as I said, we are very focused on expanding the business right now."
AT&T sold more than 10 million smartphones during Q4, setting a new record for the carrier. The carrier set its previous smartphone sales record of 9.4 million in Q4 2011. That news is important for AT&T because “these are the industry’s most valuable postpaid subscribers with average revenues twice that of non-smartphone subscribers,” said AT&T Mobility CEO Ralph de la Vega in a news release. The carrier sold an average of 110,000 smartphones per day during the quarter (http://xrl.us/bn9w96). AT&T sold 6.4 million smartphones during October and November, de la Vega had said in early December (CD Dec 6 p8). The increased smartphone sales are likely to decrease AT&T’s wireless profit margin because of the subsidies the carrier provides to subscribers, though “this strong selling effort (and the locking in of these customers to 2 year contracts) should lessen concerns that [AT&T] is seeing an ‘iPhone cliff'’ which could leave it more vulnerable to customer churn in mid-2013,” said Wells Fargo analyst Jennifer Fritzsche in an email to investors.