Verizon earnings given boost by Trump tax credit
VERIZON COMM
$52.13
17:41 26/03/20
American carrier Verizon reported earnings that fell just shy of Wall Street estimates for its fourth quarter but noted that recent reforms to US tax laws had resulted in a one-time reduction in net deferred income tax liabilities of around $16.8bn.
Net income for the three months leading to 31 December came in at $18.7bn, or $4.56 per share, up considerably from the $4.5bn posted a year earlier; however, excluding items such as the tax law, earnings per share rounded out the quarter at $0.86, two cents shy of consensus forecasts for Verizon.
Revenue crawled ahead to $34bn from the $32.34bn reported twelve months previous.
Verizon picked up 47,000 new Fios internet subscribers during the period and lost 29,000 Fios video subscribers, something the New York-based company said was a result of the shift from traditional linear video to over-the-top offerings.
Ful- year revenues were expected to grow at a low single-digit rate as service revenue growth was tapped to turn positive by early 2019.
Wall Street speculators had named Verizon as a potential merger candidate as deal-making and consolidation spread through the industry, including tie-ups at Time Warner, Disney, and the off-and-on talks between Sprint and T-Mobile.
But Verizon chief executive Lowell McAdam said on Tuesday that Verizon would not be seeking a large media merger, adding that while "it's nice to be loved," there was "nothing going on with us" regarding media acquisitions.
Verizon also ran-out Oath, a digital content and advertising arm which includes Yahoo and AOL, and was planning a 5G rollout of the unit to be part of $17bn to $17.8bn worth of capital expenditures planned for the year.
As of 1500 GMT, shares had lost ground 0.28% to $53.25 each.