Verizon has announced their earnings for the fourth quarter of 2016, and they are boasting 591,000 retail postpaid net additions. Of those 591,000, around 552,000 were 4G LTE smartphones. When it comes to their postpaid retail churn, it sat at 1.10% showing that customers have remained loyal to Verizon. Now when it comes to phones, postpaid retail churn was 0.90%. Now since they are reporting their fourth quarter results, their year-end results are also included. Verizon ended 2016 with 114.2 million connections. That’s a 1.9% increase year-over-year. Their retail postpaid connections base grew about 2.1% year-over-year to around 108.8 million. Meanwhile retail prepaid connections totaled 5.4 million. The net additions on the postpaid side for 2016 included 1.8 million 4G smartphones, and 1.4 million 4G tablets.
Revenues for Verizon Wireless were $23.4 billion in the quarter. That’s actually a decline of about 1.5% year-over-year. Verizon says that this is due to more customers choosing an unsubsidized device with or without payment plans. Revenues for the entire year amounted to $89.2 billion, that is a decline of 2.7% year-over-year. However, service revenues and device payment plans increased 1.7% in the fourth quarter. Verizon estimates that around two-thirds of their postpaid phone customers were on a non-subsidized service pricing plan. Verizon also noted that overall traffic on their LTE network increased by about 49% in the fourth quarter, when compared year-over-year. They are also touting that they extended their “Lead in the industry’s third-party network performance studies across the country.”
Now when it comes to the entirety of Verizon, and not just the wireless portion of the company, they posted revenues of $32.3 billion for the quarter. Overall, that’s a 5.6% decrease year-over-year. For the full year, they posted revenues of $126 billion, and that is a 4.3% decline. Net income for the company sat at $4.6 billion and the net income margin was 14.2%. EBITDA totaled $12 billion in the fourth quarter, and the consolidated EBITDA margin was 37.1%.
While Verizon Wireless did see a lot of decreases in a number of metrics, they still had a pretty strong quarter. A bit surprising to see revenues and income decreasing in the fourth quarter though, seeing as that is usually the largest quarter for wireless carriers due to the holidays and there being loads of promotions to get people to do their holiday shopping at the carriers. Still adding 591,000 connections in the quarter isn’t bad.