Verizon has posted its financial results for the first quarter of this year, showing strong growth that beat expectations with net income jumping 15.8% on-year to $1.95 billion ($0.68 a share) and revenue rising 4.2% to $29.4 billion. Analysts polled by FactSet expected $0.68 per share and $28.2 billion in revenue.
A major portion of that cash – $19.5 billion of the revenue to be precise – comes from the company's wireless business, which is said to have delivered record profitability and added 677,000 new postpaid users in the first quarter, pushing Verizon's subscriber count to 98.9 million from 98.2 million late last year.
Throughout the start of this year, Verizon has activated 7.2 million smartphones, with 28% of them going to new customers and 5.9 million being 4G LTE-capable. According to Apple Insider, the iPhone represented four million of the carrier's recent smartphone activations, two million being the iPhone 5.
Some 61% of Verizon's postpaid subscribers now reportedly have smartphones, up from 58% in the fourth quarter, while 54% of the company's traffic now travels through its LTE network, which covers 287 million people across 491 US markets, or about 95% of the carrier's existing 3G network footprint.
Verizon's wireline business also posted gains with revenues up 4.3% on-year to $3.6 billion and FiOS alone pulling in $2.6 billion, 15.1% more than a year ago. FiOS Internet added188,000 users while FiOS Video gained169,000, bringing their totals to 5.6 million and 4.9 million users, up 12% and 12.5%.