This ranking evaluates how Fortune 500 companies are deploying AI, and how technology leaders value those investments relative to industry peers.

Fortune AIQ 75

The companies on the Global 500 employ 70.2 million people, and their revenue represents more than one-third of the world’s GDP.

Fortune Global 500

With a combined revenue of $21 trillion and $2.1 trillion in profits, the 2026 Fortune 500 is the definitive list of America's largest companies.

Fortune 500

The 300 companies on this year’s list brought in over $12.5 trillion in revenue for the latest 12 months, with the median revenue figure at $24 billion.

America's Most Innovative Companies

AI is a major force shaping this year’s list—but it’s far from the only story.

World's Most Admired Companies

Fortune AIQ 50

The corporations on our annual list of the world's 500 largest companies combined to generate $41.7 trillion in revenue over the past year.

Almost $20 trillion in revenue—and a record-breaking $1.87 trillion in profits. Introducing the 2025 Fortune 500, the definitive list of the biggest companies in America.

The 300 companies on this year’s list brought in over $12.6 trillion in revenue for the latest 12 months, with the median revenue figure at $22 billion.

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The corporations on our annual list of the world’s largest companies delivered a record $41 trillion in aggregate revenues.

G500-2023-Verizon

The 300 companies on this list are transforming industries from the inside out.

The Fortune 500, in its 69th year in 2023, ranks the biggest U.S. companies by revenue.

F500 2023-Verizon Communications

Verizon can boast of being the U.S. cell phone carrier with the most subscribers, with about 144 million consumer and business subscribers as of year-end 2022. But revenue grew only slowly last year. 
<ul> 
 	<li>The company reported total wireless service revenue of more than $74 billion for 2022.</li> 
 	<li>In April 2023, Verizon reported broadband net additions of 437,000 in the first quarter of 2023–the largest quarterly gain in more than a decade. That helped offset a steady decline in customers for its Fios TV products, as more customers defected from traditional cable television.</li> 
</ul>

Just as it dominates our economy, Big Tech now dominates Fortune’s annual ranking of corporate reputation.

Aggregate sales hit $37.8 trillion last year—an increase of 19%, the highest annual growth rate in the list’s history.

This year’s Fortune 500 marks the 68th running of the list.

F500 2022 Verizon

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After a year in which humanity leaned more heavily than ever on tech giants, see which companies topped Fortune's ranking of corporate reputation.

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G500-2021-045-Verizon

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This year’s Fortune 500 marks the 67th running of the list.

F500-2021-20-Verizon

For an astounding 13th straight year, Apple claims the top spot in Fortune’s annual ranking of corporate reputation, based on a survey of almost 3,800 executives, directors, and analysts.

This year's Fortune Global 500 generated $33.3 trillion in revenues and $2.1 trillion in profits.

G500-2020-044-Verizon

Revenue was steady at Verizon and profits surged 24% as new CEO Hans Vestberg pursued a strategy of building the best 5G wireless network without further diversifying into the entertainment business as rivals AT&amp;T and Comcast have done. (Its Verizon Media unit retains assets from the former AOL and Yahoo, acquired in 2015 and 2017, respectively.) Instead, Vestberg has smartly partnered with others, including Disney, to supply popular shows and movies to the carrier's wireless customers. Verizon also met Vestberg's promise to start 5G service in at least 30 cities by the end in 2019, though in most areas, the coverage was quite limited.

This year's Fortune 500 marks the 66th running of the list.

F500-2020-020-Verizon

Revenue was steady at Verizon and profits surged 24% as new CEO Hans Vestberg pursued a strategy of building the best 5G wireless network without diversifying into the entertainment business, as rivals AT&amp;T and Comcast have done. Instead, Vestberg has smartly partnered with others, including Disney, to supply popular shows and movies to the carrier's wireless customers. Verizon also met Vestberg's promise to start 5G service in at least 30 cities by the end in 2019, though in most areas, the coverage was quite limited.

Here are the World's Most Admired Companies for 2019 as ranked in their industries. See who made the list.

This year's Fortune Global 500 generated $27.7 trillion in revenues and $1.5 trillion in profits.

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This year's Fortune 500 marks the 64th running of the list.

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This year's Fortune 500 marks the 63rd running of the list.

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This year's Fortune 500 marks the 61st running of the list. Wal-Mart claims the top spot again. See who made the list.

Global business is back. After limping through a worldwide financial crisis and economic slowdown, the 500 largest companies ranked by revenues shattered all sorts of performance records in 2013: They racked up combined revenues of $31.1 trillion, up 2.5% from 2012, and profits soared 27% to nearly $2 trillion. China’s 95 companies (up from 89 last year) posted $5.8 trillion in revenues. The U.S. has four fewer companies on the list than last year but remains (for now) the country leader, with 128 corporations on the list—including No. 1 Wal-Mart Stores—reporting $8.6 trillion in revenues. 

Wal-Mart stayed on top as its sales crept closer to half-a-trillion dollars. Apple moved into the top five. And UnitedHealth Group continued its steady climb. 

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Verizon Communications is a telecommunications conglomerate providing telephone and internet services to consumers and businesses, along with wire-line internet in the Northeast through its fiber-optic network, Verizon Fios. Originating as Bell Atlantic Corp. in 1984, it merged with GTE Corp. in 2000 to become Verizon Communications. Its stock is a component of the Dow Jones industrial average.

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Verizon Communications (VZ): Company Profile, Stock Price, News, Rankings

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Verizon Communications

verizon communications

Good morning, and welcome to Verizon's First Quarter 2026 Earnings Conference Call. At this time, all participants have been placed in listen-only mode, and the call will be opened for questions following the presentation. Today's conference is being recorded. If you have any objections, you may disconnect at this time. I would now like to turn the call over to Colleen Ostrowski, Senior Vice President, Investor Relations.

Thanks, Brad. Good morning, and welcome to our first quarter 2026 earnings call. I'm Colleen Ostrowski, and on the call with me this morning are our Chief Executive Officer, Dan Schulman, and Tony Skiadas, our CFO. Before we begin, I'd like to point you to our safe harbor statement, which can be found in the earnings presentation and on our investor relations website. Our comments this morning may include forward-looking statements, which are subject to risks and uncertainties. Factors that may affect future results are discussed in our SEC filings.

This presentation also contains non-GAAP financial measures, and you can find reconciliations of these measures in the materials on our website. Finally, as a reminder, the results of Frontier Communications are included in our financial and operating results beginning on January 20th, 2026, the date we closed the Frontier acquisition. With that, I'll turn it over to Dan.

Thank you, Colleen, and good morning, everyone. When I joined Verizon, I had a simple but ambitious goal. I wanted Verizon to reclaim its market leadership. Obviously, there are a lot of things we need to do right to make that happen. We need to delight our customers and put them at the center of everything we do. We need to drive consistent and fiscally responsible subscriber and revenue growth. We need to keep more of our customers as measured by our churn rate and convert that into stronger, more predictable cash generation for our shareholders.

With all of that in mind, we ended last year with our strongest quarter of mobility and broadband net adds in six years, and we entered 2026 with a clear set of priorities, a step function improvement in guidance, and a realistic plan.

Today, our first quarter results show that our turnaround is not only progressing, it is gaining momentum, powered by a comprehensive transformation program that is reshaping how we operate and serve our customers. I'm also very pleased that our East unions recently ratified a new four-year contract that we believe will enable us to better serve our customers. Let me start by saying we delivered a strong quarter across our core operating metrics, and we translated that performance into solid operational and financial outcomes, some of which we haven't seen in over a decade.

I'll briefly review the key highlights of the quarter, including the impact of the network outage we experienced earlier in January. I'll walk through three key themes. How we will continue to drive healthier growth. Second, how we will accomplish that with meaningfully better customer economics. Finally, how that leads to improved cash generation.

I'll close with how these results and the transformation work underway support an increase in our 2026 guidance for both our adjusted EPS growth and our postpaid phone net adds. In the first quarter, total revenues grew 2.9% to $34.4 billion. While our reported mobility and broadband service revenue grew below our annual guided range, our reported growth includes a one-time pressure of 80 basis points on our wireless service revenues from customer credits and other impacts related to our network outage.

We ended the quarter with momentum, with March mobility and broadband service revenue growing in the middle of our guidance range, with consumer wireless service revenue approximately flat year-over-year.

We anticipate Q1 mobility and broadband service revenues will be the low point of 2026, and we are highly confident that our forecast for mobility and broadband service revenue growth is in line with our 2%-3% guidance for the year. Importantly, the quality of our revenue is improving. We are purposely shifting our mix towards durable, recurring service revenues and away from low-margin, highly promotional activity. We are prioritizing customer lifetime value over short-term revenue maximization.

The benefits of that approach are obvious when looking at the combination of positive postpaid phone net adds, better churn, lower acquisition and retention costs, and higher free cash flow and adjusted EPS. We added 55,000 postpaid phone net adds in the quarter.

That represents an improvement of over 340,000 postpaid phone net adds versus the same period a year ago, and it's the first time in 13 years that Verizon has had positive postpaid phone net adds in Q1. Both consumer and business had significant improvements in postpaid phone net adds. Overall, we delivered almost 500,000 net adds across our mobility and broadband platforms. This is a strong continuation of the momentum we established in Q4 of last year, and it is happening while we are also improving the overall quality and economics of our customer relationships.

I'm particularly pleased to see the early results of our transformation efforts on our customer retention. Consumer postpaid phone churn in the quarter was 90 basis points, a sequential improvement of 5 basis points from Q4. Importantly, churn improved throughout the quarter.

In March, consumer postpaid phone churn improved further to below 85 basis points. That is a significant improvement both sequentially from Q4 and within the quarter, and it reversed the upward pressure we had seen in churn over the past several years. As expected, when we stop imposing blunt price increases without corresponding value on our customers and begin to remove friction from the end-to-end customer experience, they reward us with their loyalty. At the same time, we are acquiring and retaining customers far more efficiently.

Our cost of acquisition and retention in March was down approximately 35% relative to the end of Q4, and we expect to maintain a lower cost of acquisition and retention as we look forward. I would point out that we accomplished these meaningful cost reductions while still delivering increasingly positive postpaid phone net adds versus a year ago.

In other words, we are no longer predominantly reliant on expensive promotions to drive our growth. We are growing, and we are doing so in a much more disciplined, repeatable, and fiscally responsible manner. We, of course, retain the flexibility and conviction to defend our base and have a large war chest, if necessary, to react to competitive moves in the market. These trends in churn and unit economics are lifting our consumer lifetime value and are already flowing through to the bottom line and to our free cash flow.

I'd also point out that a lower cost of acquisition will benefit our future revenue growth as the headwinds of promotion amortization finally begin to subside. Adjusted earnings per share for the quarter were $1.28, up 7.6% year-over-year, our highest adjusted EPS growth rate in over four years.

Free cash flow was approximately $3.8 billion, up 4% year-over-year, and represents a strong start to the year. Our performance is consistent with and in a few key areas ahead of the guidance we laid out for 2026, driven by a better customer experience and operating efficiency. It is also the foundation for the capital allocation priorities we have outlined, investing to maintain our network excellence and our overall value proposition, maintaining our ironclad commitment to our dividend, steadily reducing our leverage, and returning capital to our shareholders.

Now, let me come back to the three themes I mentioned earlier. Healthier growth, better economics, and stronger cash generation. First, healthier growth. The story in mobility and broadband is that we are now consistently adding more of the right customers at the right economics.

The dramatic year-over-year improvement in postpaid phone net adds over the past two quarters, with continued momentum into Q2, all reinforce that our offers and our go-to-market strategies are working. We are leaning into converged value, mobility plus broadband, a simplified customer experience, and features that matter to customers rather than chasing every promotion in the market. We are also beginning to see the benefits of our transformation efforts, which make it easier for customers to do business with us and reduce friction in their interactions with us.

In fact, I'm very pleased to say that our consumer customer service team delivered its best quarter on record for customer satisfaction, driven by improved resolution, fewer handoffs, and faster response times. In broadband, we continue to aggressively expand our footprint, increase penetration, and position those assets as a core part of our long-term growth story.

We are solidly on track to have more than 32 million fiber passings by the end of this year. We are early in the journey of fully monetizing the combination of best-in-class mobility and a growing fiber and fixed wireless access footprint. We already see in our net adds and in our improved churn that customers value having more of their connectivity needs met by a single trusted provider.

Our Frontier integration is on track, and I'm extremely pleased with the level of teamwork and focus from go-to-market execution to network integration, and all with a keen focus on driving convergence and delivering on our more than $1 billion of run rate operating cost synergies by 2028. Now let me turn towards our second theme, which revolves around driving better economics. The improvements in churn, acquisition costs, and retention costs are not one-off events.

They are the result of specific choices we have made over the past 200 days and the early benefits of a broader transformation we have launched across the company. We have put in place an ambitious company-wide transformation built around 10 major work streams. These work streams span everything from becoming an AI-first company to reducing friction in every step of the customer journey to reexamining outdated internal policies and procedures that slow us down and add to bureaucracy.

We aim to simplify our products and services, apply micro-segmentation to better match offers to customer needs, and drive towards our goal of being the most efficient telco in the world. Each workstream has a dedicated cross-functional tiger team with clear monthly and annual targets and a disciplined governance process that reviews progress, unblocks issues, and reallocates resources where needed.

This program is changing how we run the company day to day. As I've mentioned before, we will not rely on empty across-the-board price increases that create short-term financial gains but erode the long-term trust of our customers. Instead, we aim to delight customers. A central pillar of our upcoming new value proposition is the end-to-end redesign of our customer experiences to ensure we delight each customer in every interaction.

Our commitment to customer value and trust is becoming part of our corporate DNA, embedded in how we design offers, how we communicate with our customers, and how we measure success internally. We are in the final stages of extensive market research that will inform a new generation of offers built around the principles of transparency, simplicity, and genuine value delivery.

We have begun to embed AI and automation into our operations and customer interactions, which is already significantly improving customer experiences and lowering costs. We will encourage more volume into digital sales and service channels, which lowers costs, increases engagement, and leads to higher customer satisfaction. We have begun to see meaningful cost benefits from our transformation efforts as we take out legacy structural costs from the business. Consequently, we are well on our way towards our OpEx savings target of $5 billion in 2026.

Churn is the clearest measure of whether our efforts are resonating with our customers. When we achieve the kind of churn benefits we did during the first quarter, it has profoundly positive implications for our business model. Every cohort now contributes more revenue, more margin, and more cash. That effect compounds over time.

Lower churn also makes our marketing dollars work harder because we are not simply replacing customers who leave, we are adding to a more stable base. Our advertising is also evolving, as exemplified by our Connor's Story brand advertisement, which resonated powerfully across social media and focused on our service and our network, not promotions or handsets. The same is true for acquisition and retention economics.

We were able to meaningfully drive year-over-year improvement in our postpaid phone net adds while driving the cost of acquisition and retention lower by approximately 35%. Obviously, this fundamentally changes the return on investment we make to attract and keep our customers. As I mentioned, the less we spend on promotions, the lower our amortization headwinds, enabling a step function change in our future revenue growth. These improvements come from the work our teams are doing in our transformation streams.

Smarter channel mix, less friction, better tools and modeling, the beginning of AI-enabled processes, and a tighter focus on fiscally responsible offers that drive profitable growth. We expect these more efficient levels to be sustainable under our current strategy, and we see additional opportunities to further improve our trends as our transformation matures. Finally, our third theme revolves around stronger cash generation.

The combination of healthier subscriber growth and better economics is evident in our first quarter free cash flow results, and we are confident in our annual guidance of approximately 7% or more growth. We are seeing the benefits of a more disciplined capital program where we continue to invest in capacity, coverage, and reliability, but do so with sharper prioritization and better utilization of the assets we already have.

We are also continuing to execute on our operating expense initiatives, which are delivering a substantial war chest to continue our investments in driving our end-to-end value proposition while driving continued shareholder returns. We see room for further meaningful efficiencies in the years ahead while simultaneously advancing our primary goal of delighting our customers, and by doing so, driving long-term sustainable revenue growth.

We have also discussed in our previous earnings calls that we aim to drive incremental margin by eliminating, sunsetting, or creating structures to dramatically reduce our exposure to non-core assets. We are well underway in this journey, and we look forward to sharing more details shortly. All that brings me to our updated outlook.

On the back of our first quarter performance, the leading indicators we see in our business and the traction we are seeing in our transformation work streams, we are raising our guidance for adjusted EPS growth to 5%-6% versus the prior range of 4%-5%. We also now anticipate our postpaid phone net adds to be in the upper half of our 750,000-1 million range.

We are reaffirming the balance of our guidance, mobility and broadband service revenue growth of 2%-3%, with Q1 being the low point of 2026, and free cash flow growth of approximately 7% or more versus last year. We are making these changes early in the year because the data supports a higher level of confidence.

We are ahead of pace on postpaid phone net adds, and doing so with lower churn, better unit economics, and record customer satisfaction scores. We have clear line of sight to the remaining costs and capital efficiency actions that underpin our free cash flow target, and the transformation program gives us additional levers as the year progresses. At the same time, we are far from assuming a perfect environment. We operate in a dynamic and rapidly changing landscape. Our revised guidance continues to reflect a prudent view of competitive dynamics and the macro political and economic environment.

Our capital allocation priorities remain unchanged. We will continue to invest in our network, our platforms, and our people to deliver the reliability and experiences our customers expect. We will, of course, maintain a strong and sustainable dividend, reflecting the cash-generating nature of our business.

As Tony will discuss, we are delivering on our commitment to return capital to shareholders. We will continue to use excess cash to strengthen our balance sheet over time, giving us flexibility as markets and opportunities evolve. We remain on track to return to our target leverage ratio in 2027.

To summarize, in the first quarter of 2026, Verizon grew underlying mobility and broadband service revenue in line with our annual guidance, delivered positive postpaid phone net adds in Q1 for the first time in 13 years, reduced churn meaningfully quarter-over-quarter, and exited the quarter with consumer postpaid phone churn below 85 basis points. All while significantly lowering both acquisition and retention costs, driving our best adjusted EPS growth in four years and delivering strong free cash flow. We did all of this while addressing a significant network event transparently and decisively.

At the same time, we have launched and are executing against a 10-string transformation program that is making Verizon an AI-first, simpler, more efficient, and more customer-centric company. On the strength of that performance, the transformation work already underway, and the trends we see in the business, we are raising our adjusted EPS growth outlook to 5%-6%, and we anticipate our postpaid phone net adds will be in the upper half of our guided range while we maintain our free cash flow and mobility and broadband service revenue guidance.

We still have much to accomplish, and we are far from our longer-term aspirations, but the direction of travel is clear. We are growing. Our customers are staying longer. We are serving them more efficiently by executing on a disciplined transformation agenda, and we are converting all of that into stronger, more durable cash generation for our shareholders. With that, I'll turn it over to Tony to provide more detail on the quarterly results, and then we will take your questions.

Thanks, Dan, and good morning. Our first quarter results reflect a strong start to the year. We built upon the operational momentum from the fourth quarter and continued executing on our transformation efforts to deliver on both volume and financial growth. Dan has discussed our plan to deliver long-term sustainable financial and operational growth, and our first quarter results show the early impacts of that plan. We're on track to deliver our 2026 guidance, including increased guidance for postpaid phone net adds and adjusted EPS growth.

In mobility, we are pleased that for the first time since 2013, we generated positive first quarter total postpaid phone net additions. Our first quarter results of 55,000 included significantly better performance from both our consumer and business segments.

Consumer postpaid phone net losses were 35,000, a 321,000-improvement year-over-year, driven by a higher mix of new-to-Verizon gross adds. In total, the year-over-year improvement of 344,000 reflects our consistent and disciplined go-to-market approach, solid execution of our volume growth strategy, and steady progress with churn. While there is more work to be done with customer experience, which is the largest component of our transformation plan, we're pleased to see early signs of progress towards our goals.

Total postpaid phone churn was down 5 basis points sequentially to 0.97% for the first quarter. Consumer postpaid phone churn was 0.90%, down 5 basis points sequentially and improved throughout the quarter as we took actions to delight and retain our customers. In prepaid, we grew our customer base for the seventh consecutive quarter.

We delivered 115,000 net adds driven by our Visible and Total Wireless brands, demonstrating the continuing strength of our prepaid business and our segmentation approach. We look forward to optimizing the value of each of these brands as we continue our transformation. Shifting to broadband, we continued to take share in the first quarter and delivered 341,000 broadband net adds. This includes 214,000 fixed wireless access net adds and 127,000 fiber net adds. We now have approximately 16.8 million broadband subscribers. We are confident in the long-term success of our broadband strategy.

Frontier accelerates our opportunity to grow our broadband subscribers as well as our converged offerings, a key enabler to growing wireless share in under-penetrated frontier markets. In the first quarter, in addition to Frontier, we've also closed the Starry transaction, an investment that will enable us to drive further broadband growth opportunities in multi-dwelling units within urban areas. Overall, we're pleased with our operating results for the first quarter as we have seen significant improvement in our net adds. We look forward to continuing our commercial momentum throughout the year.

Now let's turn to our consolidated financial results. Our first quarter financial results show our disciplined execution is directly translating into operating leverage. We are driving financial growth and strong free cash flow even as we undergo a transitional year for revenue.

Mobility and broadband service revenue was $22.9 billion for the first quarter, a 1.6% increase year-over-year. This result includes $20.6 billion of wireless service revenue, which was down 1% year-over-year. Customer credits associated with the network outage reduced first quarter wireless service revenue by approximately 80 basis points. As previously communicated, we continue to absorb elevated promotional amortization pressures and are lapping approximately 180 basis points of pricing impacts implemented in the prior year.

We expect to improve upon our first quarter's wireless service revenue performance by maintaining low churn, being disciplined around cost of acquisition and cost of retention, and continuing to drive net adds. Additionally, we continue to see strong performance with perk adoption, continued growth in premium base mix, and prepaid.

Given these factors, we are confident we will achieve our full-year revenue guidance and expect to have an even stronger and more sustainable revenue profile by the end of 2026. Our disciplined financial approach and targeted actions led to strong profitability this quarter. Consolidated adjusted EBITDA was $13.4 billion, a 6.7% increase from the prior year. Adjusted EBITDA margin of 38.9% expanded by 140 basis points. This represents our highest ever reported adjusted EBITDA performance, and we expect it to be an industry-leading result.

We are growing responsibly with healthy economics in both the cost of acquisition and cost of retention. We are also making significant tangible progress with our cost efficiencies. During the quarter, we realized substantial savings in key areas including advertising, network operating expenses, and workforce-related costs.

A significant portion of these savings dropped directly to the bottom line while we simultaneously reinvested a portion back into the customer experience. Our integration of Frontier operations is progressing well. We are on track to deliver over $1 billion in run rate operating cost synergies by 2028. While there is more work ahead to drive further efficiencies, our first quarter performance puts us on track delivering our $5 billion of operating expense savings target for 2026.

Our focus on the customer and our cost discipline drove adjusted EPS of $1.28, up 7.6% year-over-year, even as we incurred the incremental depreciation and interest expense associated with the Frontier acquisition. Our performance reflects our responsible growth and our actions taken to streamline the business to make us more agile in serving our customers.

This gives us the confidence to raise our guidance for adjusted EPS growth for the full year to 5%-6%. Now let's turn to our cash flow and balance sheet. Our financial foundation has never been stronger. Our cash flow generation remains a cornerstone of our financial strength and a testament to our high-quality earnings. Cash flow from operating activities was $8 billion for the first quarter.

We achieved this strong result even after absorbing severance payments of approximately $1.1 billion related to our restructuring efforts, incurring costs associated with the Frontier integration, and delivering higher gross add volumes. We're on track to achieve our CapEx guidance of $16 billion-$16.5 billion for the full year. Capital expenditures for the quarter were $4.2 billion.

We continue to invest strategically for network excellence and future growth opportunities in a disciplined way by prioritizing our wireless and fiber builds. As Dan mentioned, we expect to end the year with more than 32 million fiber passings. Free cash flow for the quarter was $3.8 billion, up 4% year-over-year. We expect our free cash flow performance to ramp as we further realize the full run rate of our operating expense savings and grow volumes responsibly. We are on track to deliver our full-year free cash flow guidance of $21.5 billion or more.

Our robust cash flow enables the seamless execution of our capital allocation framework, including investing in our business, maintaining a strong dividend, strengthening our balance sheet, and returning additional value to shareholders through stock buybacks.

Our net unsecured debt to consolidated adjusted EBITDA ratio increased due to the acquisition of Frontier to approximately 2.6x at the end of the quarter. We are making good progress and have paid down about half of the Frontier debt since the acquisition closed, and we expect to repay substantially all of Frontier's debt by the end of the year. We remain firmly on track to achieve our target net unsecured leverage ratio of 2.0x-2.25x during the 2027 time frame. Lastly, we are delivering on our commitment to enhance shareholder returns.

In January, we declared an annualized dividend increase of $0.07 per share, up 2.5% from our prior annual dividend rate. This marks the twentieth consecutive year of dividend increases, a track record we're extremely proud of.

In addition, our stock buyback program is off to a strong start. We successfully completed $2.5 billion in share repurchases during the first quarter. We are in a position of significant financial strength, generating the cash necessary to invest in our future, reward our shareholders, and maintain a healthy balance sheet. In summary, our customer-centric approach has generated a step function change in our performance trajectory. We delivered positive first quarter total postpaid phone net adds for the first time since 2013 and raised our full-year phone net add outlook.

We achieved our best adjusted EBITDA in history, and we also delivered our best quarterly adjusted EPS growth rate since 2021 and raised our full year adjusted EPS guidance. We returned a significant amount of capital to our shareholders, including commencing our first share buyback in over a decade.

Our first quarter results demonstrate that our transformation is gaining momentum and we're delivering on our plan. This is the new Verizon, playing to win. With that, I will now hand the call over to Colleen to take your questions.

[crosstalk] Thank you, Tony. Brad, we are now ready to take questions. As a reminder, we would ask you to please limit yourself to one question.

Thank you. We will now begin the question-and-answer session. If you would like to ask a question, please press star one on your touch tone phone. Please unmute your phone and record your name clearly when prompted. Your name is required to introduce your question. If at any point your question has been answered or you would like to withdraw your request, you may remove yourself by pressing star two. One moment please for the first question. Your first question will come from Michael Rollins of Citi. Your line is open, sir.

Thanks. Good morning and congratulations on the early progress. Curious if you could discuss the performance of accounts and ARPA with the business in the quarter, as well as, you know, what that means for the go-forward outlook for these measures, including how the current promotional environment and your pricing strategy are influencing the performance. Thanks.

I think I'll jump on that, Mike, and then we'll Tony can add color if he so desires. Look, I think if we take a step back, you know, clearly we're now orienting everything we do around a customer-centric approach. Just by definition, that means that we're thinking about accounts and not just lines. I would say previously, the company predominantly focused on lines, and that's just not our approach going forward. As a result of that focus, our trajectory is moving in the right direction.

Account net adds improved year-over-year in both consumer and total retail postpaid, and that's in the same quarter we delivered our best postpaid net adds in 13 years, and that's not a coincidence. A customer-centric approach is driving our progress on both fronts.

The net adds we're adding are higher quality than those that are rolling off. Our new accounts are being added with more lines per account. Our percent of new to Verizon continues to climb, and that's a leading indicator of where our account number is headed next. Look, we're also very focused on driving higher revenue with every line. We are no longer giving away lines for free. Our entire approach is to grow our accounts and lines and overall ARPA. I think there are a lot of different ways that we can do that.

We can do that through convergence. Clearly, as we are more disciplined in our COR and our COA, we believe we're gonna start to see the headwinds of promotion amortization on our revenue growth rate start to flip and become tailwinds.

You know, the majority of the ARPA decline in the first quarter came from our decision to do the right thing for customers on the network outage and to immediately give them credits because we absolutely always want to do the right thing for customers and we value the long-term relationship with our customers.

We feel really good about the way we reacted to our network outage, but obviously that's a one-time event and doesn't come and follow us through the rest of the year. I would say in general, we expect to see account net adds continue to improve as well as ARPA as we go through 2026 and as we go into 2027.

Yeah, just to add a couple things to that, Mike. You know, we exited the quarter with good momentum. You know, the team's focused on running good business and the new to Verizon's up 150 basis points, which is great to see. We see a lot of opportunities with convergence, and we saw that in the quarter with bringing Frontier into the fold. Then also, we've done a lot of work on bringing value to customers, the things like perks. We've seen significant uptake in perks, step ups and of course, in FWA.

As Dan mentioned, you know, we do expect improvements in ARPA as the year progresses. You know, as we continue to reduce our reliance on expensive promotions, that'll obviously reduce the headwind on promo amortization as we move ahead. That's how we're thinking about it.

Brad, let's take the next question [crosstalk].

The next question will come from Michael Ng of Goldman Sachs. Your line is open.

Good morning. Thanks for the question. I wanted to ask about upgrade rates and the changing approach to device subsidies. You know, what are you expecting around upgrade activity for the rest of the year, and how do you balance improved profits on some of these lower device subsidies versus opportunities to use devices to drive gross adds, given that it should be a strong device refresh year? Thank you.

Yeah. Well, I would say both on our cost of acquisition and our cost of retention, you know, the improvements that we saw throughout the quarter, these are structural changes. They're not one-time or seasonal.

We would expect that based on that micro-segmentation, really understanding what our customers exactly want, and what our customized offer to them will be, will result in us being able to be much more disciplined in how we think about retention. You know, not every retention is going to be a free handset. In fact, quite the opposite. I mean, I think our industry has been too dependent on free handsets being the solution for everything.

I think all of us, and I know for sure Verizon can be much more profitable when we start to micro segment, really listen, to what a customer wants and not just give them a free handset for everything. I'll give you an example of that.

You know, if a customer calls us, and says that they're having a difficulty, you know, with service in their home, previously, what we would have done is send them a free handset, so that they wouldn't churn. What would happen at that point is the customer would have a nice new handset and still have poor service at their home. We just spent, like, $1,000 and did not solve the customer's issues.

If we had listened and sent a Femtocell to be installed at the house, we could have done that at one-third the cost and made the customer happy. That's what's happening right now. We're listening to what customers really want. We're customizing offers to exactly their needs, and we are moving away from just having one tool in our toolbox, becoming much more sophisticated.

As we continue to micro segment, we're gonna become much, much better at this. I think, you know, we will continue to be ferociously focused on retention and acquisition. Doing it in a smart, fiscally micro-segmented manner should really improve our unit economics going forward.

Yeah. Michael, just a couple other things to add to that. Obviously the strong cash flow generation that we have in the business gives us a lot of optionality and scenario planning. You know, in the quarter, we were able to absorb about 6% higher upgrade volumes year-over-year, you know, being more surgical, as Dan mentioned, with retention offers and also having strong cash flow. The one thing I can say is the rate of growth in upgrades has slowed the last couple of months and into the second quarter.

That's both reflective of the work we're doing, particularly on retention and being very segmented in our approach and very disciplined and also customer choice, customers, you know, choosing to hang on to their phones for longer periods of time. Obviously we don't guide on this, but we'll see how it plays out. We're being very disciplined in our approach.

The next question will come from John Hodulik of UBS. Your line is open, sir.

Great. Thanks. Maybe two, if I could. First on the cost cutting, maybe for Tony. Any color on sort of how much of the $5 billion in OpEx savings we've seen thus far and how it ramps through the year? Then, there are a lot of sort of bullish commentary on volume trends in the wireless business. How should we expect the fixed wireless and fiber broadband trends to sort of play out through the year as you sort of digest the fiber assets and get the converged offerings sort of up to speed? Thanks.

Sure. Good morning, John. On the cost transformation, let me just start big picture. Obviously we're making significant progress on the transformation work and the cost work and it's showing up in the EBITDA. As we said in the prepared remarks, you know, we expect EBITDA to grow at a faster rate than adjusted EPS when you factor in both the Frontier acquisition interest expense, which is about $1 billion, and also the depreciation from the asset base, which is about $1.5 billion.

Obviously, you know, we had good acceleration in EBITDA and really good operating leverage. To your question, you know, we're off to a great start on the $5 billion of cost transformation, and we're seeing proof points in the quarter.

Maybe I can break down between the first quarter and also what's in progress and coming ahead. In terms of what we're seeing right now, first and foremost on the network side and network operating costs, the team's doing a great job in continuing to decommission legacy elements in the network, and that includes copper and recycling that copper and also monetizing that copper, as well as you know, optimizing our third party access costs with our larger footprint. There's a lot more we can do here when you think about the Frontier coming into the fold.

Verizon Communications (VZ) Q1 2026 Earnings Call Transcript

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