Verizon today posted its Q4 earnings report and, to the disappointment of many, the company fell short of predictions. The company’s competition has increased significantly over the past year and the strain of this is starting to show. Verizon’s wireless service declined 4.9% when compared to last year and to make things worse the company doesn’t expect its wireless side of the company to return to growth until 2018 at the earliest.
Looking more into the details, the company managed to add a total of 591,000 postpaid net subscribers, while its postpaid churn rate was 1.1%., which came in a fair amount below what Wall Street had expected, with Wells Fargo Securities expecting the company to add a total of 715,000 customers along with a slightly lower churn rate of 1.07%. Not all was bad, though, with the company posting 167,000 net phone adds, significantly higher than the 57,000 that was predicted. The company did add 196,000 of its total net additions with lower-end tablet deals, too. Overall, although some figures were lower than predicted the company did manage to post $16.3 billion revenue for its wireless service, which was what was expected from the company.
Aside from the wireless business, the company’s media side generated a total revenue of $532 million which represents a decline of 5% year over year, though the company said this was due to a deal made between AOL and Microsoft in Q4 2015. There was one area that experienced significant growth for the carrier, with the company’s IoT side of the company posting revenues of $243 million, representing a 21% increase year over year. Although this represented a bright side to the company’s results, it wasn’t sufficient to impress and led to a 4% decline of the company’s shares. The company is betting on improving its network size and capacity in order to drive growth of its wireless service, while simultaneously avoiding the introduction of unlimited data plans. With unlimited data plans proving a big success of the likes of T-Mobile it’ll remain to be seen if the company can successfully return to growth for 2018 and once again start widening the gap between itself and its competitors. But with the speed of growth that the likes of Sprint and T-Mobile are seeing it might be difficult to pull off.