Verizon Tops Profit Estimates as Revenue Slips
Verizon (VZ) - Get Report posted second-quarter results slightly above Wall Street expectations and predicted that full-year adjusted earnings would be similar to 2015.
The stock fell slightly in premarket trading on Tuesday.
The New York-based telecommunications giant said that second-quarter 2016 earnings per share, excluding some items, were 94 cents, exceeding forecasts of 92 cents. The figure compares to $1.04 a share for the same period last year.
Second-quarter revenue amounted to $30.5 billion, largely in line with expectations and 5.3% below what they were in the same period last year. Analysts surveyed by Thomson Reuters had forecast a figure of $30.95 billion.
"Verizon's second quarter shows that the company continues to deliver strong results while evolving operations and advancing a strategy to sustain network leadership, build new ecosystems and deliver the promise of the digital world to customers," said Lowell McAdam, Verizon's CEO and chairman, in a statement.
The company said it added 615,000 net retail postpaid wireless subscribers in the second quarter.
Adjusted earnings excluded costs related to employee pensions and benefits, as well as the impact of a seven-week strike at Verizon's wireline business earlier this year which negatively impacted earnings by 7 cents a share, the company said.
Looking ahead to the full year, the company said it expects 2016 adjusted earnings to be "at a level comparable" to 2015, excluding the negative impact of the recent strike.
The earnings report comes a day after Verizon announced a deal to buy Yahoo's (YHOO) core assets for $4.8 billion in cash.
That deal marked the final chapter of a long auction process that kicked off in early February, when the struggling Internet company announced it would explore strategic alternatives for the assets. After the combination, Yahoo! is to become part of Verizon's AOL division, whose brands include HuffingtonPost, TechCrunch and AOL.com.