Verizon’s Successful Wireline Business
The unions that have staged strikes against Verizon (NYSE: VZ) believe that the company does well enough in its ancient wireline business that they should remain well compensated. Verizon usually highlights its wireless operations as the reason Wall St. should…
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Verizon’s latest quarterly filing shows that wireline revenue was flat in the second quarter at $10.2 billion. Operating income rose from $207 million in the quarter last year to $318 million. Verizon’s consumer retail business — the home phone — had steady sales of $3.4 billion. Cellphone and VoIP service are not destroying this base as quickly as many believe.
Verizon can reasonably make the case that over time more of its residential customers will turn to alternative means for the “talk” service in their homes. There are, however, as many reasons for people to keep the service as to discard it. Cellular connections often do not work indoors. VoIP phone service drops when the electric power to a home is cut. Many people have phone numbers that are decades old and remembered by large numbers of people.
Verizon and its rivals will continue to argue that residential wireline service has seen its best days. The jury is out on that. Strikers walking the picket lines outside Verizon offices have a case to make that Verizon should compensate them for helping to operate a successful business — because they do.
Douglas A. McIntyre
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Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.
McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.
His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.
A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.
TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.
McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.
