Verizon reported their Q1 2012 earnings this morning and as seems to be expected, they were up year-over-year (8.9% to be exact in retail and 7.7% in service). They tacked on 734,000 retail customers, bringing their total up to 93 million. They also sold 2.9 million LTE devices (phones, tablets and the new iPad) (2.1 million were phones) along with 3.2 million iPhones. Data now makes up for 43% of service revenues which is at $4.3 billion, up 36%.
This all comes on the heels of Verizon's announcement that they would need to charge a $30 upgrade fee when existing customers buy new phones on contract. The reasoning for the fee was explained as a means to continue to fund their workshops and development of bloatware Verizon-branded apps. Makes sense, right? Since they are clearly struggling so much…
The full press release is below if you are into reading such things. For even more details, you will want to check out the full earnings call transcript.
