Verizon Added 406,000 Phone Customers, More Than Double What Wall Street Expected. Craig Moffett Says It’s Not From Price Cuts

VerizonVZ added 406,000 postpaid phone customers in the third quarter, a total a CNBC segment described as more than double what the Street expected. Postpaid customers sign up for monthly plans and pay after they use the service. They are the most valuable customers in wireless because they tend to stay longer and spend more. The MoffettNathanson co-founder and senior analyst credited the quarter to operational repairs during a CNBC segment titled Craig Moffett on Verizon’s Q3 Results: A Really Nice Result Overall.

Moffett pointed to CEO Dan Schulman: “Dan Schulman came in and promised that he was going to fix what was broken about Verizon. And by and large, he’s done exactly what he said he was going to do.” He added: “He’s done it with good old fashioned blocking and tackling, fixing some of the marketing problems that the company had. And it’s working.” According to the segment, that record runs counter to an early expectation that Schulman would be a “really aggressive price cutter.”

How Verizon Fixed Its Account Problem

The difference between accounts and subscribers matters here. An account is the household or business paying the bill. Subscribers are the individual lines on that bill, so a family of four counts as one account with four lines. “They had been losing accounts even while they’d been gaining subscribers. That was always a bit of a head scratcher,” Moffett said. He explained that Verizon had been losing smaller one-line and two-line accounts, and that a new pricing plan built on simplicity “seems to have worked.”

The foundation showed up on the July call. Management described Simplicity as “$45 with our best network performance. One plan, one price, no games,” and said it was essentially subsidy-free for every new account. Promotional cost of acquisition improved about 15% year over year, and retention costs improved about 17%. Postpaid phone churn, the share of customers who leave each month, improved to 0.92% in the second quarter from 0.97% a year earlier, according to Verizon’s Q2 earnings release filed with the SEC. Management also said it expected positive new account growth in the third quarter.

Beyond Subscribers: Cash Flow, Guidance and AI

Earnings beat estimates while revenue came in slightly below consensus, per the CNBC segment. According to BigGo Finance’s earnings call coverage, Verizon raised full-year guidance and free cash flow reached $7.8 billion. The CNBC segment said Verizon is on track for 1.1 million to 1.2 million phone additions this year. In July, the target was the upper half of 750,000 to 1.0 million. Telco Magazine reported Verizon also signed a $2 billion AI deal with Amazon Web Services, the cloud unit of AmazonAMZN.

Third quarter at a glance

Starlink Worries Investors More Than It Threatens Earnings

Moffett addressed the competitive concern around satellite service directly: “It’s years before anything about what Elon Musk has threatened to do with Starlink could realistically impact Verizon’s revenues or earnings. So it’s a negative. It’s a narrative overhang rather than an earnings overhang.”

A narrative burden is a story that weighs on how investors value a stock even though it has yet to show up in revenue or profit. Investors may pay less for future earnings because they fear a threat, even while current results improve.

Why Verizon Shares Fell on a Strong Quarter

On Oct. 26, the day Verizon reported, the stock traded at $43.54 as of 11:41 AM ET, down 2.51% on the day. At that price, shares were down 1.4% over the past week and 7.5% over the past month, and up 6.9% year to date (about 14% counting dividends). By mid-September, Verizon had outperformed the broader market by about 20 percentage points this year, according to the CNBC segment, and has since given back that relative gain. The day’s decline arrived alongside the revenue miss, with the Starlink story also in the background, so no single factor explains it.

Every report

Only 7 of Verizon’s 86 earlier earnings reports drew a bigger drop than this one

Verizon’s stock move on each report day since 2005, close to close. It reports before the market opens. Dark dots are Dan Schulman’s first four as CEO. Coral is Oct. 26, 2026.

What to Watch Next

• Subscriber momentum: whether Simplicity keeps drawing one-line and two-line accounts as it grows.
• Revenue catch-up: whether service revenue begins tracking subscriber gains, since revenue missed consensus this quarter.
• Starlink: whether the concern stays a story or appears in churn and pricing data, which Moffett says is years away.

Moffett’s view is that Verizon’s operating repairs are already showing up in the numbers. The next few quarters should show whether revenue growth starts to follow.