T-Mobile and AT&T may be crawling over one another trying to offer better deals these days but Verizon has been mostly content to sit back and watch while offering the occasional price cut to keep its customers happy. Re/code reports that Verizon CFO Fran Shammo said at a Deutsche Bank technology conference Monday that he wasn’t at all worried about the price wars going on between AT&T and T-Mobile because he’s learned from experience that aggressively undercutting your competition’s prices is self-destructive in the long run.
“We’re not going to buy customers,” Shammo said. “You have to earn customers.”
In a lot of ways, it seems like Verizon sees itself as the Apple of the wireless world: It can get away with charging more money for its services because it believes it offers a superior product that its customers have shown they’re willing to pay for. Pretty much every study of wireless carriers in the United States has shown that Verizon has the best mobile network around, especially in terms of reliability, voice call quality and SMS performance.
In its Q4 2013 earnings announced earlier this year, Verizon revealed that it added 4.1 million postpaid subscribers in 2013 and 1.6 million postpaid subscribers in the fourth quarter alone — all while T-Mobile was piling on with its assorted “Uncarrier” plans. Until Verizon’s subscriber growth starts to decline, there’s really no reason for the carrier to change what has been a hugely successful and profitable business plan.
