Verizon's Profit Way Up Following Full VzW Acquisition

Verizon‘s profit skyrocketed in the first quarter thanks in big part to wrapping its acquisition of nearly half of Verizon Wireless from Vodafone.

The communications giant was $3.95 billion in the black, up from a little less than $2 billion in the first quarter of last year. Revenue jumped to $30.8 billion, up almost 5 percent. That was slightly above Wall Street’s estimates.

In February, Verizon gave Vodafone $130 billion for the 45 percent of Verizon Wireless that it didn’t already own. The carrier expects its 2014 profit to continue to spring upward as a result of the acquisition, MarketWatch noted.

“We are already seeing the expected earnings accretion from the transaction,” said Lowell McAdam, Verizon chairman and CEO. “The full access we now have to the significant cash flows of Verizon Wireless is energizing our efforts to provide customers with product and service innovations and to enable powerful solutions to some of the world’s biggest challenges.”

Verizon Wireless’ postpaid subscriber growth was a little slower than a year earlier. America’s largest wireless provider added 539,000 new subscribers, compared to 677,000 in Q1 2013. Overall, its number of retail wireless customers is up 4.4 percent from the same time last year. VzW’s revenue jumped to almost $21 billion, up nearly 7 percent.

Verizon’s subs growth was smaller than AT&T’s for the first time in many quarters. AT&T reported on Tuesday that it added 625,000 postpaid subscribers between Jan. 1 and March 30.

Big Red said FiOS also made gains, with 98,000 new residential and business customers for its high-speed Internet service, and 57,000 for video.

Speaking of business, Verizon said sales of strategic services – notably private IP, Ethernet, data center, cloud, security and managed services – to global enterprise customers increased 1.8 percent compared to the year-ago quarter. 

Follow senior online managing editor @Craig_Galbraith on Twitter.