Verizon Beats Q4 Earnings Expectations As FiOS Video Sub Growth Slows

January 21, 2014 5:41am

Shares are up a little less than 1% in pre-market trading following this morning’s report. The company says that it generated $7.9B in net income in Q4, up from a $1.9B loss in the same period in 2012 (with pension and Superstorm Sandy costs), on revenues of $31.1B, +3.4%. The top-line number came in just slightly ahead of analyst expectations for $31.0B. Adjusted earnings at 66 cents a share beat the consensus estimate by a penny. Verizon says that all of its major businesses grew in Q4: It added 1.7M retail wireless connections for a total of 35.1M retail postpaid accounts. It also crowed that it has “substantially completed deployment of [the] 4G LTE smartphone lineup.” That growth outweighed the continuing decline in its wireline voice business where the number of connections fell 5.2% to 11.2M. The big declines are among customers served by its antiquated copper wires — it’s trying to move many over to Verizon FiOS services with fiber optic lines. The number of FiOS Internet customers rose 2.1% in the quarter to 6.1M. The FiOS video business also grew, but at a slowing pace: With 5.3M subs, it’s up 1.8% in the quarter. CEO Lowell McAdam says that the company is “attracting more customers than our competitors and improving our financial performance.”