CEO Says Verizon Is Now Playing to Win as Stock Price Soars
Verizon reported Friday that it saw 616,000 postpaid phone net adds in Q4, beating the consensus estimates, and said it anticipates up to a million adds in 2026. New CEO Dan Schulman told analysts that the carrier is “at a critical inflection point” and plans to stay “fiscally responsible” as it adds subscribers. Verizon’s stock price was up 11.78% for the day to $44.52 per share.
Sign up for a free preview to unlock the rest of this article
Communications Daily is required reading for senior executives at top telecom corporations, law firms, lobbying organizations, associations and government agencies (including the FCC). Join them today!
“We went into the ring -- we offered a set of promotions,” Schulman said. “The prevailing attitude inside Verizon is that we are now going to play to win, and we will never again be content to be the hunting ground where our competitors take our share and our customers.” In Q3, Verizon lost a net 7,000 prepaid phone subscribers. Last quarter was the company’s best for subscriber gains since 2019.
The Q4 results show “we can compete effectively and win,” Schulman said. Earlier last week, AT&T reported 421,000 wireless postpaid phone net adds (see 2601280074). T-Mobile reports this week.
Schulman started the call by acknowledging the Jan. 14 outage, which affected millions of Verizon wireless subscribers nationwide and is the target of an FCC proceeding (see 2601290015). “We let our customers down,” he said.
He also said that Verizon's plans to cut about 13,000 jobs (see 2511200054) and make other belt-tightening moves will mean billions of dollars in savings. “We moved quickly to right-size our organization by aggressively removing pockets of underperformance, eliminating redundant organizational structures, reducing layers of hierarchy and cutting resources not focused on our priorities,” including both full-time employees and contractors.
Schulman highlighted the carrier’s recent completion of its purchase of Frontier as well (see 2601230037).
Among other results, Verizon added a net 319,000 subscribers to its fixed-wireless service and 67,000 to its Fios internet offering. Q4 revenue was $36.4 billion, up from $35.7 billion a year before. The carrier also posted $1.09 in adjusted earnings per share, down from $1.10 a year earlier. Postpaid phone churn of 1.02% was up 10 basis points over last year.
MoffettNathanson’s Craig Moffett noted that with the Frontier acquisition, Verizon’s fiber footprint is now almost as large as AT&T’s. “In its emphasis on subscriber growth first, Verizon isn’t exactly plowing new ground,” Moffett wrote. “Schulman’s strategy is almost precisely the same strategy that AT&T has followed for the past six years.” Moffett also said he expected lower churn, since Verizon’s strategy “was supposed to be retention first. … What we got in Q4 was instead higher churn offset by higher gross adds.”
Outage Comments
Two comments have been filed so far in docket 26-21, the FCC's proceeding on the Jan. 14 outage. Mandy Santiago, a museum director in Delaware, said she was late to a meeting with a donor when the GPS on her phone stopped working. “I was initially pleased to see a text from Verizon indicating that a refund would be issued, but was quickly disappointed to see it offered NO explanation as to what caused the outage and that it was limited to $20,” she said.
Subscribers Pooja Singh, Santoshi Pokhrel and Parag Pokhrel jointly complained about being unable to call a doctor or 911 because of the outage.