Verizon Communications Inc. on Friday said it lost $198 million in the second quarter due to a buyout for 11,000 workers.
p
Excluding the severance costs and other items, earnings beat Wall Street expectations while revenue was slightly lower than analysts had expected. CFO John Killian projected earnings for the rest of year that would be roughly in line with analyst expectations.
p
Its shares rose $1.09, or 4 percent, to $28.09 in morning trading Friday.
p
The nation’s second biggest phone company said it lost the equivalent of 7 cents per share in the April to June period. That compares with net income of $1.48 billion, or 52 cents per share, in the same period last year.
p
Excluding various charges, mainly for the buyouts, earnings would have been about 58 cents per share in the latest quarter. That is 2 cents more than analysts surveyed by Thomson Reuters had expected, on average.
p
Verizon said its revenue slipped 0.3 percent to $26.8 billion from $26.9 billion a year ago, though that was in part because of the one-time effect of a change in accounting for wireless data plans. Without that change, revenue would have grown 0.7 percent, still slightly short of analyst expectations at $27.1 billion.
p
The New York-based company has been laying off workers quickly in the shrinking traditional phone business. It offered a buyout to union workers in May, with a $50,000 one-time bonus per employee, improvements to pension payouts and other benefits. Verizon expects 11,000 to take advantage of it, and said two-thirds of them had left the payroll as of early July.
p
Verizon ended the quarter with 210,800 employees, 24,500 fewer than a year ago.
p
Verizon did well in the highly competitive wireless business, attracting 665,000 customers under contract. That’s fewer than in past years, but contract-signing customers have been drying up for all carriers this year,…