It looks like it's a surprisingly good time to be a behemoth US carrier, with both
AT&T and Verizon reporting some pretty aggressive profits in the first quarter of 2008 in the face of a flagging economy. Many of Verizon's results closely mirror AT&T's actually, with data revenue absolutely destroying the numbers from a year ago -- up 48.9 percent year over year, in Big Red's case. As we can see from Verizon's own documentation here, they're tooting their horn against their arch-nemesis with more net adds, a slightly better ARPU, lower churn, and lower cost per customer, with service revenue and total subs (of course) being AT&T's big wins. Whether the momentum can be kept up through a challenging '08 remains to be seen, but it's a solid start for the nation's number two. Hit the gallery below for a big shot of Verizon's message to employees regarding the results.
[Thanks, anonymous tipster]
posted Apr 30th 2008 2:11PM
Take that, you stupid iPhone!
Verizon's numbers, according to your graph, look a lot more impressive over AT&T's being that they trail them in total customers.
It looks like VZW does a better job in attracting retail-direct customers than its larger rival which helps it in margins despite having slightly few total subscribers.
Verizon is evil, but it's a powerful, effective kind of evil.
The reason I will be switching from AT&T to Verizon when my contract is up this fall: Much more EV-DO coverage nationwide than AT&T's 3G coverage.
AT&T should listen to Verizon's ads. If they focused on "the network" more, they would probably leave Verizon in their dust with their better phones and slightly less vindictive pricing models. But no, the 3G rollout has been painfully slow.
As long as I have no 3G in most of my county (one of the more populous in Northern Virginia), I'll be lining the pockets of a /different/ greedy, dishonest, faceless cellular provider...
AT&T in fact does a better job of ATTRACTING retail-postpaid customers...it's just the problem of KEEPING THEM.
AT&T grossed a record 5 million new customers in the first quarter...that's a record for ALL carriers, not just AT&T. But since their overall churn remained flat at 1.7%, they netted much fewer customers than Verizon.
For every tenth of a percentage point that AT&T lowers their churn, they'll retain and in turn improve their net adds by approximately 200,000 customers. This is where they need to put their focus on; retention. They're ahead of the game with everything else.