Verizon to cut jobs following a loss for the quarter

Verizon Communications, the country’s biggest wireless carrier said today that because its second quarter profits fell 21%, it will be cutting more than 8,000 employees and contractor jobs by the end of the year. The measure is one of the most drastic cost cutting measures that the company is implementing.

Verizon’s wireline business has failed to keep up with the falling revenues and has to cut the jobs in order to keep costs in line according to CFO John Killian.

Verizon has, in the past, balanced the job cuts in wireline with the amount of people being hired in its wireless division. However, this time that will not be the case and they are not going to be looking at hiring in the wireless division with the latest rounds of job cuts.

“We probably will not have large-scale hiring until we’re out of the recession,” Strigl said in an interview.

The quarter for Verizon ended with the company having 235,000 employees, which is 6,000 higher than the same quarter last year even with 8,000 job cuts throughout the year. In the totals, contractor jobs aren’t included in the totals.

When earnings came out, Verizon still beat Wall Street expectations, even if they only narrowly beat them. Verizon blamed the recession and falling demand for cell phones and new home TV service as a reason for the decrease.

At the same time, there was an additional 1.1 million customers to subscribe to the cellular service. This was in line with analyst expectations as the company ended the quarter beating out AT&T again. Verizon has 87.7 million customers while AT&T has 79.6 million. AT&T is, however, beating out Verizon in how many customers it is adding per quarter, last quarter it netted 1.37 million customers (which is likely thanks to its media barrage of the iPhone and other services).

Verizon’s wireless division doesn’t currently have a great device that can compete with the iPhone and until it does it will continue to fall behind AT&T in my opinion. I believe that the Blackberry Storm wasn’t the amazing phone that everyone thought it would be and while Blackberry will be coming out with a new device called the Storm 2 later this year, the company has said that it will not be getting rid of some of the features that made the phone so unpopular to begin with.