Tue, 01/27/2009 - 07:03 by Greg Sterling
Verizon reported a fairly strong Q4 (especially in wireless). Here are the wireless highlights:
- 1.4 million organic (non-acquisition-related) net customer additions, almost all retail; 1.2 million total net customer additions
- 72.1 million total customers; 70.0 million retail customers, up 9.9 percent, not including customers added with the Jan. 9, 2009, acquisition of Alltel.
- 12.3 percent increase in total revenues; data revenues up 41.4 percent
More wireless tidbits (verbatim from the release):
- Following the recently completed Alltel acquisition, Verizon Wireless now serves more than 80 million customers, excluding markets to be divested.
- Verizon Wireless continued to have low churn -- 1.35 percent churn among all customers, and 1.05 percent among the company's retail post-paid customers.
- Total service ARPU of $51.72 was up 1.4 percent year over year
- Data revenues of $10.7 billion for the full year were up 44 percent over 2007. In the fourth quarter, data revenues were 26.8 percent of all service revenues, up from 21.3 percent in the fourth quarter 2007. Verizon Wireless had 55.1 million retail data customers at year-end -- 79 percent of the retail customer base and a 16.8 percent increase over year-end 2007.
- More than 65 percent of the company's retail customers -- 45.5 million -- had 3G broadband-capable devices by year-end.
ZDNet, which listened to the conference call, quoted Verizon President Dennis Strigl on growing smartphones sales:
We’re selling more smartphones–37 percent of retail devices sold are smartphones. We’re also increasing focus on the retail segment. I don’t think we lost share this quarter. We have no evidence of customers slowing or trading down. Our churn did pick up a bit from last year.
Apparently all that was said about the BlackBerry Storm was the following from the release:
Customers across the country lined up to purchase the new BlackBerry Storm, available exclusively in the U.S. from Verizon Wireless and launched in November. Designed for both consumers and business customers, the BlackBerry Storm offers customers the reliability of the Verizon Wireless 3G network and the full power of a revolutionary touch-screen, multimedia smartphone with global connectivity.
The absence of any specific numbers or further discussion may indicate that the Storm is becoming BlackBerry's Vista.