“I think the economy is still just kind of moseying along; it is not going down,” says Verizon CFO Fran Shammo. “I don’t see it increasing and we have predicted that it will just be stable through this year.” So, at least at the moment, Verizon does not see any particular economic trends that would affect its business in a positive or negative way. It will just motor along about as it has been doing.
That wasn’t the case in European enterprise markets, though. “We were growing our European market about 13 percent to 15 percent year-over-year on a consistent basis and that dropped to flat” in the first quarter of 2012.
“I don’t anticipate that that will be a long pullback for us,” Shammo says. “We are already starting to see sales pick up in the enterprise space.”
“But obviously as everybody knows in enterprise, what you sell today you really won’t implement and book for six months out,” he says. “So I think we will probably see another two quarters of this and then we will probably get back to where we are.”
