Telecom Lead Asia: Verizon’s chairman and CEO Lowell McAdam has done extremely well in the global telecom market.
Verizon Communications’ Q3 profit growth at 16 percent to $1.59 billion from $1.37 billion in the year-ago quarter is a commendable achievement.
McAdam attributes Verizon’s success to market conditions and team.
Verizon Communications’ 3.9 percent growth in Q3 revenues to $29 billion from $27.91 billion in the year-ago quarter also surprised several analysts.
Verizon’s growth drivers include 4G LTE network advantage, well-received Share Everything Plans and product portfolio. Verizon CTO Nicola Palmer said more than 35 percent of the company’s data traffic was carried on the 4G LTE network at the end of September.
“Wireless achieved record profitability in a quarter in which we reported the highest number of retail postpaid gross and net adds in four years,” McAdam said recently during the analysts call.
Based on the strength of its FiOS fiber-optic network, Verizon reported the highest growth in U.S. consumer wireline revenues in 10 years.
Strategic services growth in Verizon’s enterprise business helped offset weaker revenues caused by global economic challenges.
Verizon Wireless, like its rivals AT&T and Sprint Nextel, is spending billions of dollars on upgrading its network to support booming demand for services like web surfing and video on smartphones like the Apple iPhone.
But Verizon CEO is cautious about Capex. In 2012, capital expenditures are expected to be lower than 2011 capital expenditures of $16.2 billion.
Recently, Yankee Group said: In an attempt to catch up to Verizon’s spectrum levels, AT&T is putting together approximately $2.6 billion in spectrum deals, proposing at least 24 deals in the last four months.
Verizon recently bought airwave rights from four major cable companies for $3.9 billion according to Bloomberg Businessweek.
Its rival AT&T has been trying to rectify its spectrum needs for over a year now, starting with its plan to take over T-Mobile. AT&T has reported that its data traffic has been doubling annually, and while it hoped its T-Mobile plan would do the spectrum work for AT&T, that fell through.
Verizon CEO believes in global partnerships.
Telefonica and Verizon have unveiled plans to explore and exploit commercial opportunities from aggregated and anonymized mobile traffic data, according to Ovum. The telcos are allocating significant resources to develop their Big Data strategies, and both have created new divisions to pursue the opportunity.
According to Strategy Analytics, Verizon, like its key competitor AT&T, effectively operates in a single market – the USA – which forces it to seek innovation and change within that space, being denied the opportunity for example to expand in newly developing markets in Asia or Latin America.
For this reason Verizon can be expected to have a significant impact on the m-ICT industry in the coming 5 years directly in the USA and indirectly elsewhere, through its drive for innovation in a market widely regarded by the world as the birthplace of Mobile Apps. Verizon is strongly committed to innovation by expanding into new Mobile sectors such as Consumer and M2M, and into new use case such as Home, Commerce and Transport.
Verizon is also heavily committed to growing its FiOS high-speed broadband services, to counter the declining trends in traditional wireline. Urgency in this area will drive Verizon to innovate in new IP services and integration in the home.
Note: TelecomLead.com’s editors have selected the CEO based on the impact he created on the industry and the company.
Krishna Aravind
editor@telecomlead.com
