Incoming Verizon CEO Lowell McAdam said it may be “a quarter behind” on its goal to reach its smartphone targets because it had banked on an iPhone 5 being launched in the summer.
McAdam made the comments on Verizon’s second quarter earnings conference call. The company reported better-than-expected financial results, activated 2.2 million iPhones and officially said McAdam would become CEO Aug. 1.
In January, Verizon outlined a goal to have half of its devices be smartphones by the end of the year. One analyst noted that the smartphone mix through the second quarter—36 percent of Verizon’s retail postpaid customer base has a smartphone—would fall short.
On the conference call, McAdam said:
We are probably what I would view as maybe a quarter behind what we had talked about in January , primarily because we expected an iPhone 5 refresh sometime this summer . We don’t know when the next one is going to come out. You will have to ask Apple that. But we expect that probably sometime in the fall, and I think you will see a significant jump there when we get to that point. On the LTE side, I can’t tell you how pleased I am at how the device manufacturers have stepped up with all kinds of devices. We are beginning to see even in the machine-to-machine space LTE modules, because the latency is so much better than we have in a 3G environment. Our fourth-quarter lineup is going to be very robust. You have seen — you have gotten a little bit of a peek at that through devices like the Samsung [Charge]. So the screen density is so significantly better than what we have seen in the past. So I think we are going to have probably in my entire career the best fourth-quarter lineup of devices I have seen, which will shift that mix that you talked about.
Overall, McAdam said he was satisfied with Verizon’s iPhone activations—4.5 million to date—given there’s no iPhone 5 on the immediate horizon. And then there’s AT&T, which has held its own.
“Given the delay of the iPhone 5 is more than a quarter, I think we have actually performed quite well. AT&T is a strong competitor, and they have done a lot of things to be a strong competitor. But I like our porting ratios. I like our growth rate versus theirs,” said McAdam.
