Verizon reports 5.3% fall in revenue
bengaluru — Verizon Communications reported a bigger-thanexpected fall in quarterly revenue as the No 1 US wireless carrier’s operations were disrupted by a strike involving its wireline workers and more customers opted for cheaper plans.
Verizon also signed up far fewer new retail wireless postpaid customers than expected in the quarter ended June 30, and its shares slipped 0.4 percent in premarket trading.
The company’s total operating revenue fell to $30.53 billion in the second quarter, from $32.22 billion a year ago.
Analysts had expected revenue of $30.94 billion, according to Thomson Reuters I/B/E/S.
Verizon added a net 615,000 wireless retail postpaid subscribers, compared with the 784,000 expected on average by analysts surveyed by market research firm FactSet StreetAccount.
Sprint Corp, the No 4 US wireless carrier, added a net 173,000 postpaid phone subscribers in the period.
Verizon’s net income attributable to Verizon fell to $702 million, or 17 cents per share, from $4.23 billion, or $1.04 per share, a year earlier.
A strike by about 40,000 Verizon wireline employees reduced earnings by about seven cents per share. The earnings also took into account a non-cash charge of $2.2 billion, mostly associated with new labour contracts and the sale of local landline businesses to Frontier Communications.
san francisco — When senior Yahoo executives gathered at a San Jose hotel for a management retreat in the spring of 2006, there was no outward sign of a company in crisis.
The internet pioneer, not yet a teenager, had just finished the prior year with $1.9 billion in profits on $5.3 billion in revenue. The tough days of the dot-com bust were a distant memory, and Yahoo Inc, flush with lucrative advertising deals from the world’s biggest brands, was enjoying its run as one of the top dogs in the world’s hottest industry.
But for one retreat exercise, everyone was asked to say what word came to mind when a company name was mentioned. They went through the list: eBay: auctions. Google: search. Intel: microprocessors. Microsoft: Windows.
Then they were asked to write down their answer for Yahoo.
“It was all over the map,” recalled Brad Garlinghouse, then a Yahoo senior vice president and now COO of payment settlement start-up Ripple Labs. “Some people said mail. Some people said news. Some people said search.”
While some executives said this was a useful management exercise that took place multiple times over the years, it proved an ominous portent of the business troubles to come.
Indeed, the demise of Yahoo, which culminated in an agreement this week to sell the company’s core assets to Verizon Communications, has been more than a decade in the making. Many of the more than two dozen former Yahoo managers interviewed by Reuters over the past two weeks — who now occupy executives suites elsewhere in Silicon Valley — agree that the company’s downfall can be traced to choices made by both the executive leadership and the board of directors during the company’s heyday in the mid-2000s.
Some of the missed opportunities are obvious: a failed bid to buy Facebook for $1 billion in 2006. A 2002 dalliance with Google similarly came to naught. A chance to acquire YouTube came and went. Skype was snapped up by eBay. And Microsoft Corp’s nearly $45 billion takeover bid for all of Yahoo in 2008 was blocked by Yahoo’s leadership.
Just as damaging as the missed deals, though, was a company culture that ultimately became too bureaucratic and too focused on traditional brand advertising to prosper in a fast-moving tech business, according to some of the former Yahoo managers Reuters spoke with.
Yahoo today has more than one billion users and has focused on mobile under chief executive Marissa Mayer, who told Reuters in an interview on Monday that she still saw a ‘path to growth’ for Yahoo, which the Verizon merger accelerated.
Yahoo will continue to operate as a holding company for its large stakes in Alibaba and Yahoo Japan, which are worth far more than the core business. Yahoo declined to comment for this story. —