Verizon posts Q1 profit, revenue increases

Verizon Communications continues to produce financial results that contradict the notion that the economic recession is affecting telecom. The telco reported first-quarter earnings that included a 5.3 percent increase in net income to $3.21 billion and a revenue increase of more than 11 percent to $26.6 billion. Wireless growth, including benefits from the company's acquisition of Alltel, continued to drive overall growth. The company added 1.3 million wireless subscribers during the first quarter, topping AT&T wireless customer additions of 1.2 million, which reportedly surprised many analysts.

Verizon also saw strong contributions from its FiOS broadband efforts, as FiOS TV collected 299,000 new subscribers during the quarter and FiOS Internet landed 298,000 subscribers.

Some key wireline business services, such as managed services, Ethernet and security solutions--a set known as strategic business services--showed a 7.5 increase in revenue to $1.5 billion. However, wireline revenue overall fell, as residential landline connections dipped 10.4 percent, not quite as sharp of a drop as the 12 percent decline reported by AT&T last week. It was unclear Monday morning how much the success of Verizon's new Hub media phone might be offsetting at least a small amount of that landline loss. We'll follow up with an update later today.

For more:
- Here's the Verizon earnings press release [1]
- The Wall Street Journal has this post [2]