Verizon has released its Q1 results for 2017 via the news portion of the company website and things are looking mostly good for Big Red so far, with strong customer loyalty and market share growth. The service provider’s phone connection “churn” numbers – which, for the unaware, is a market term used to describe customers lost as cancelled out by new customers gained – is shown at less than 0.9 percent for the eighth straight quarter. Tablet churn rested at 1.5 percent for the quarter. Meanwhile, the company has seen 49,000 new smartphones added to its network with a year over year growth figure of 1.2 percent. That brings the company’s total number to 108.5 million connections. On the other hand, prepaid connections grew to 5.4 million, a difference of 0.5 percent. Internet of Things revenues increased by around 17 percent from last year, which includes a total in telematics revenue of $214 million.
As to Verizon’s wired services, total revenue dropped 0.6 percent from 2016’s numbers. Total Fios revenue grew by 4.7 percent and the company gained 35,000 Fios Internet connections while losing 13,000 Fios Video connections. The company also gained new market share with the addition of new agreements between the company and both new and established clients. These are reported to include Block Institute, the State of Connecticut, Georgetown University, HRC ManorCare and Xplor. The wired side of the business also jumped from a loss of $67 million across the same time frame last year to $293 million in income, which is not an insubstantial shift. Company expenditures for the first quarter came in at $3.1 billion, with a large portion of that probably coming down to the finalization of Verizon’s XO Communications acquisition. That acquisition was part of the company’s efforts to remain competitive since it provided the service provider with substantial fiber optics assets. That number also likely includes boosts to the total number of Verizon small cells on the wireless side of things.
Unfortunately, the total of Verizon’s operating revenues in this quarter came in at a 7.3 percent decrease year over year – only bringing in $29.8 billion. Some of that may be down to the company losing 307,000 postpaid connections, 289,000 of which were phone contracts. That’s a pretty heavy loss since retail postpaid makes up a decent chunk of the company’s revenue stream. AOL, one of Verizon’s company’s, also suffered a 4 percent decrease. That is explained in the report as being due to “a higher percentage of programmatic advertising.” Looking forward, however, the company expects the rest of its performance in 2017 to be mostly consistent with 2016. Moreover, it has set a 2018 to 2019 time frame for returning to former credit rating profile from before 2014 and expects to spend between $16.8 billion $17.5 billion over the course of the year to keep its network competitive.