Verizon’s Q1 results are now out and available. There’s really not much here in the way of surprises. It’s basically the same as every other quarter. Verizon rakes in a ton of cash and adds a ton of new customers. For the first quarter, Verizon actually brought in $30 billion in revenue as a whole, but Verizon Wireless account for $21 billion of that. As most of you probably know, Verizon is also an ISP, offering internet and TV in some parts of the country. The $21 billion in revenue for Verizon Wireless is a 7% increase over Q1 2013. Verizon’s profit margin in wireless is 35%, which is also an increase over last year which had a 32.9% profit margin. Part of the reason for the jump is Verizon’s buyout from Vodafone, buying their 45% stake in Verizon Wireless back for a mere $130 billion. Which that deal finalized last quarter.
Additionally, that increase in profit and profit margin is also due to the new customers they’ve added. Verizon added 549,000 total new customers, and 539,000 of those were postpaid, while the remaining 10,000 were all prepaid – which is actually surprising to me. AT&T did beat them out in adding more customers, which is probably due to them dropping prices on their plans to attempt to compete with T-Mobile. But Verizon did beat them out in revenue and profit, which is where it really counts. Also, Verizon is still the largest carrier. Right now they are sitting at 97.3 million customers – that’s more than double what T-Mobile and Sprint have as of Q4 2013, since their Q1 results aren’t out yet. Of those 97.3 million customers, about 72% of them are on smartphones. That’s a big chunk, and still a pretty big chunk of people left on feature phones. Which is also pretty surprising.
So Verizon continues to drive in tons of money keeping their shareholders happy. It’s going to be interesting to see how T-Mobile and Sprint’s numbers compare, since we’ve already seen AT&T’s numbers yesterday.