Verizon Communications posted its fifth consecutive quarter of revenue growth, noting a continued shift from traditional services to wireless, long-distance, broadband and bundled offerings. Total Q3 reported operating revenues of $17.2 billion were up 1% compared to the same period last year. Reported earnings were $1.8 billion and EPS was 64 cents, or 67 cents before one special item related to pension settlements. Some highlights of the quarter:
- domestic telecom revenues were $9.9 billion — a decline of 4.1% compared with Q3 2002 and essentially flat compared with Q2 2003.
- Long Distance: added 1.3 million net long-distance lines. Long-distance revenues increased 17.2% to $1.0 billion in Q3 2003, compared with Q3 2002.
- Wireless: added 1.4 million net subscribers in Q3 — the highest quarterly increase in its history — bringing its customer total to 36.0 million. ARPU was more than $50 in Q3, up 1% over the prior-year quarter. Verizon Wireless added 1.2 million net retail customer in Q2.
- DSL: added 185,000 DSL lines giving it a total of 2.1 million lines. approximately 74% of Verizon’s 56.2 million access lines qualify for DSL service . The company said it will hit its target of 80% by year’s end.
- Bundling: approximately 44% of Verizon’s residential customers have purchased local services in combination with either Verizon long- distance or Verizon DSL, or both.
- Access Lines: The total number of switched access lines in service declined to 56,155,000 from 58,456,000 at the end of Q3 2002. The number of resale and UNE-p lines increased to 5,378,000 from 3,891,000 at the end of Q3 2002. UNE-p net additions for Q3 were 479,000 compared to 518,000 UNE-p line losses in Q2.
- Data services: signed nearly 330 Enterprise Advance contracts in Q3, giving it over 800 customers in total for its corporate data networking service. The average contract length is 2.5 years. The company has signed 59 of the Fortune 500 firms. Revenues for high-capacity and data services were $1.8 billion in Q3, down slightly from the year-earlier period
- Debt: there was $800 million in free cash flow for the quarter. Net debt was reduced to $44.7 billion at the end of Q3, compared to $51.8 billion at year-end 2002.
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