Telecom Review recently listened in on Verizon’s Q4 2020 Earnings Conference Call on January 26. Below are his unedited comments from the call;
First of all, 2020 was a challenging year and I can only say that I’m super proud how Verizon responded to the changing environment during 2020. And we supported our customers, our employees and society in a way that I’ve never seen before. So, all in all, a great year. At the same time, we executed well on our strategy and so that we had really good financial performance as well.
When it comes to our 2020 strategic priorities, let me walk through the execution of them. First of all, strengthening and grow the core business, I’m really proud to announce that we continue to have the best network in the nation. We just got for the 15th time the overall best network with RootMetrics on all seven different categories. That includes 5G, which is so important to us that we continue to have that lead.
I'm also happy to announce that we won for the 26th consecutive time the J.D. Power’s award. It tells a lot about our network and technology team, how they have been building a network and how we continue to lead this market.
When it comes to the customer innovation, you have seen us working with our customers to give them richer offering, and also even better performance on the network. This year with Disney+, Discovery+, also adding in the iPhone 5 from Apple has, of course, supported a lot of innovation that we're doing in the Verizon Consumer Group. And we see a great migration of our customers to unlimited and to the premium unlimited.
Finally, you can see also that Verizon Business Group has a year on investments to see that we are putting a foundation to be much stronger for the future had good growth in the wireless, and also in some areas like the public sector, very good performance and also adding local new customers on the enterprise side.
When it comes to us leveraging the assets to drive new growth, the commitments we did in February 2020 when it comes to 5G were all met or exceeded. I'm extremely happy with that. We now have 64 Ultra Wideband cities. We are more than 10 cities on our home 5G Ultra Wideband, we have 10 Mobile Edge Compute centers public with Amazon. All in all, we deployed more than 5x more Ultra Wideband sites during 2020. And we launched the nationwide 5G that now is covering 230 million POPs in 2,700 cities.
On the financial side, a strong year ended where we had more than 2% growth in the wireless service revenue. We also have growth on our EPS in the fourth quarter, over 7%. We had an operational cash flow full year of $41.8 billion, which is a growth of 17%. A very strong year that put us in a good position while going into 2021.
And finally, we’ve a really large focus on how to include all our four stakeholders in the work we are doing. And I’m really proud of the Citizen Verizon that we launched during last year, which is a great way for us to see that the society aspect is part of our strategy, where, of course, our focus on being carbon neutral is very important; and the second green bond was launched at the second half of 2020. So, all in all, I’ve to say, it was a very different year, but a great execution where we hit all our strategic milestones at the same time as we pivot and supported all our stakeholders.
At the November sell-side event, I presented the five vectors of growth. Those are the vectors that is based on our strategy of Network-as-a-Service. Those are also the enablers for us to get to GDP plus. We have great traction on them, and we also have done quite a lot in 2020, all the way from the 5G adoption to the customer differentiation that I talked a lot about, the new markets that we are addressing still pending the acquisition of TracFone, but we have other segments we are addressing, as well as the next-generation business-to-business application based on our unique Mobile Edge Compute offering that we have with Amazon, also now with Microsoft and many other partners.
And finally, the network monetization with our MVNO partners, which are enjoying the best network that we have and we are building. All in all, this is built on the Verizon Intelligent Edge Network that we outlined some 3 years ago and giving us the opportunity to have great execution in the future.
