Talk about taking the lead. Verizon has just posted the industry’s highest Q2 revenue numbers. At $12.1 billion, Verizon has increased their earnings by 11.8%. While still technically the No. 2 US wireless carrier, Verizon Wireless’ quarterly earnings easily outpaced those of the leading US wireless carrier, AT&T. Big Blue lagged behind Verizon by about $85 million.
The financial news comes on the heels of Verizon’s announcement that they added more customers (1.5 million) to their network in Q2 2008 than did AT&T (1.3 million), helping to close the gap between the two giants’ subscriber bases.
Verizon’s good fortunes are being buoyed by customers’ increased adoption of data-plans. While the CDMA carrier’s ARPU (average revenue per user) dipped to $51.53, compared to $51.84 in the same period last year, data ARPU rocketed to 31.3%. And, it doesn’t hurt that Verizon saw customer churn drop to 1.12% from 1.3% last year.
With Verizon pushing hard to make sure their Alltel acquisition makes the FCC-cut, the company is poised to take the US wireless market by the horns. AT&T, still claiming the top-spot with the most wireless subscribers, could see Verizon leap-frog ahead of them with Alltel’s customer base absorbed into their own. That’s not even considering Verizon’s plans to leverage their recent 700Mhz spectrum acquisitions to launch their LTE network in coming years.
[Via: RCR]