Earnings

Verizon earnings: 86 cents a share, vs 89 cents estimate

Pedestrians cross Herald Square in front of a Verizon Wireless store in New York.
Richard Levine | Corbis | Getty Images

Shares of Verizon fell on Tuesday in premarket trading after the company reported quarterly earnings below Wall Street's expectations.

Verizon posted fourth-quarter earnings excluding items of 86 cents per share on revenue of $32.34 billion.

Analysts expected Verizon to report adjusted earnings of 89 cents per share on revenue of $32.092 billion, according a consensus estimate from Thomson Reuters.

Shares of Verizon were down more than 4 percent on Tuesday, tracking for its worst daily performance in more than 5 years.

Verizon also confirmed that it is laying off 155 staffers at go90, mostly affecting the millennial-oriented mobile streaming service office.

"These changes are not indicative to a change in our strategy and we remain committed to rapidly enhancing our existing online video products and delivering new products," Verizon said in a statement.

Shares of Verizon, whose acquisition of Yahoo has been doubted by some analysts, were down more than 2 percent following the news.

Chairman and CEO Lowell McAdam said management has positioned the company for "future growth and continued sustainable shareholder value."

"In the fourth quarter we expanded our customer base in highly competitive wireless and broadband markets," he said in a statement. "This capped a year in which we delivered solid results and returned value to shareholders, including $9.3 billion in dividends. We enter 2017 with confidence, based on our investments in next-generation networks and the new capabilities we have acquired. Our goal is to continue to earn our customers' loyalty every day in a rapidly expanding mobile-first digital world."

Verizon added a net 591,000 retail postpaid subscribers in the quarter, and said it had 114.2 million retail connections, a 1.9 percent year-over-year increase.

The quarterly results come amid Verizon's pending acquisition of Yahoo in a $4.8 billion deal, which has been met with hurdles after the search engine company announced two huge securities breaches.

The hacks, which affected at least a billion accounts, has triggered questions about whether the deal would still be viable and, if so, at what price.

After the second breach was revealed, Verizon told CNBC: "As we've said all along, we will evaluate the situation as Yahoo continues its investigation. We will review the impact of this new development before reaching any final conclusions."

Verizon said on Tuesday it "continues to work with Yahoo to assess the impact of data breaches."

Earlier this week, the Securities and Exchange Commission said it would probe the company over whether it appropriately disclosed the breaches to investors.

Yahoo reported its results for the quarter on Monday.

The company said its acquisition by Verizon would close "as soon as practicable" in the second quarter of this year, due to the "work required to meet closing conditions."

—Reuters and CNBC's Anita Balakrishnan contributed to this report.