All in all, Verizon Wireless had a pretty good quarter this past quarter. We’re starting to see results coming in from the first quarter of the year, with Verizon being first this time around. They added about 565,000 retail postpaid subscribers. Churn for the carrier also decreased in the quarter, from 1.07 to 1.03. For those unaware, Churn is the rate that users are leaving your carrier compared to those coming in. Verizon has seen some historic rises in churn over the past few years, but it looks like it’s coming down again.
While Verizon added 565,000 postpaid subscribers this quarter, they also lost 188,000 prepaid customers. Although Verizon has made it clear that they don’t care to much about prepaid services these days. That’s also a 4.8% increase from a year ago, where they added 539,000 customers. While Verizon added 621,000 LTE smartphones in the first quarter, they also lost about 374,000 3G smartphone customers. Which brings their overall growth to just 247,000 customers. Meanwhile, Verizon added 820,000 LTE tablets and also reported a net decline of 385,000 feature phone customers in the first quarter.
Revenues were up to $22.3 billion in the quarter, a 6.9% increase over last year. Verizon also stated that Edge Installment plans increased 3.9% year over year. About 6.5% of Verizon’s retail postpaid subscriber base upgraded in the quarter and about 90% of those upgrades were to smartphones. Which brings about 6 million smartphone sales through upgrades. Verizon also stated that around 80% of their postpaid customers have smartphones, that’s up from 72% a year ago. About 85% of their smartphone customers use LTE smartphones, after adding 4.3 million LTE devices to their customer base in the quarter. Additionally, the carrier stated that about 86% of its mobile data is over LTE, that’s up from 84% in the fourth quarter of 2014. Verizon Wireless now holds 71.7 million retail postpaid LTE connections, or 70% of its postpaid subscriber base. That’s up from 49.3% at the end of the first quarter of 2014.
Overall Verizon had a pretty great quarter. Especially looking at their churn. Which was 1.07 in Q1 2014, and 1.14 in Q4 2014, now down to 1.03. Looks like less people are leaving Verizon this time around. That’s great news for Verizon and its investors.