Verizon starts payment plans

Customers to see unpaid balances spread over several bills

Verizon Communications Inc. has enrolled its covid-affected customers in extended payment plans after the pledge to keep them connected expired at the end of June.

Chief Financial Officer Matt Ellis was asked on the company’s second quarter earnings call about customers who face financial hardship due to the pandemic. He said about 1.5 million people are signed up under the pledge. Of those customers, about 300,000 haven’t made payments. AT&T said Thursday that it had 338,000 nonpaying customers.

With phone connections an essential lifeline, the nation’s top wireless carriers agreed to keep serving customers even if they couldn’t make their payments.

The Keep Americans Connected pledge expired June 30.

AT&T said it was working to retain its customers. Verizon is taking the payments owed by its customers and spreading them out over several months on top of the regular bills.

There’s always a portion of customers that don’t pay their bills, and the numbers due to covid “are not too dissimilar to what we’ve always seen,” Ellis said.

“The numbers we have don’t concern me.”

Verizon set aside a $220 million cash reserve in the first quarter to cover nonpayments by customers affected by the pandemic, and the company didn’t add to that total in the second quarter, even as the spread of the coronavirus has accelerated.

“Our business is performing well,” Ellis said. “The macroeconomic environment will be the biggest determiner of whether we have to adjust those reserves. We’ll just have to wait to see how it plays out.”

Verizon reported second quarter net income of $4.7 billion in its earnings report Friday.

On a per-share basis, the New York-based company said it had profit of $1.13. Earnings, adjusted for nonrecurring costs, were $1.18 per share.

The results exceeded Wall Street expectations. The average estimate of 17 analysts surveyed by Zacks Investment Research was for earnings of $1.16 per share.

The largest U.S. cellphone carrier posted revenue of $30.45 billion in the period, also topping Wall Street forecasts. Seventeen analysts surveyed by Zacks expected $29.91 billion.

Information for this article was contributed by Scott Moritz of Bloomberg News and by staff members of The Associated Press.