Verizon Communications Inc. (NYSE:VZ) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

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Phil Cusick : Sticking with wireless on service revenue, when I pull out the definition change from other to service revenue, you’re guiding to roughly 1% to 2% wireless service revenue growth in ’23, which is a big deceleration from almost 6% this quarter. How should we think about this in regards to phone adds and ARPU and the impact of promotions on service revenue? Can you just put the pieces together for us? And do you expect that service revenue will stay positive each quarter this year or actually flips to negative at some point? And just on top of that, typically, we see things much slower in terms of subscribers from 4Q to 1Q, while I don’t expect you to guide on subscribers, do you think we’ll see sort of typical seasonality this quarter? Or do you anticipate sort of better performance?

Hans Vestberg : I can start, and then Matt can break down the numbers you’re talking about. I mean, yes, on the premium segment, there is seasonality in the first quarter, and I don’t think that’s going to be different this year. However, our work is to keep up the momentum that we had from the fourth quarter into this year, where we had good store traffic quarter-over-quarter and also high conversion rate. But it also means that we need agile and see what’s happening in the market. And it’s a little bit early to do any guidance or something like that, which we’re not doing on net adds. But clearly, there is going to be seasonality, but we have good momentum, and we’re going to continue to execute and be very close to the market. Matt?

Matthew Ellis : Yes, Phil, so kind of unpacking some of the piece parts of your question there. So seasonality, absolutely, we expect that to look reasonably as you would expect throughout the year from an overall standpoint. In terms of the service revenue guide, your math there is correct. When you think about the fourth quarter, you said close to 6%. Remember that included a full quarter of owning track in 4Q this year versus only part of 4Q last year. So as we get into ’23, finally on a year-over-year basis to talk about stuff on an apples-to-apples basis and not with and without M&A items, which is nice. So once you remove that very similar. In terms of the piece parts within wireless service revenue guide, think about you got the positive impacts of the price ups.

Obviously, we had six months impact last year, approximately, you get a full year impact this year. Also the benefit of the FWA momentum we had and having 1.4 million subscribers in the base at the start of this year that we’re building throughout the year. But that’s offset by the promo amortization, which, as I mentioned in the upfront comments will be higher in the income statement year-over-year, with the timing of the recognition of that. And then also the impact of the volumes last year, offsetting some of the ARPA benefit we had. So the task for the team going forward is to continue the momentum that we started to see in the second half of last year, as Hans mentioned, and that will put us in a position to continue to push service revenue in the positive direction going forward.

Operator: The next question is from David Barden of Bank of America.

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