Verizon Communications Inc. VZ

The business

Verizon sells wireless service, phone and data plans, to consumers and businesses, plus home internet over Fios fiber and fixed wireless. The recurring monthly bills, service revenue, are $29.2B of the $34.3B quarterly total; the rest is handsets sold on installment. The moat is physical: it owns nationwide licensed spectrum and the towers and fiber to light it, a network only AT&T and T-Mobile can match, and moving a family's phone numbers and plan is enough friction that most people never do. The economics are simple and brutal, a high fixed cost to build and maintain the network, then near-pure margin on each added subscriber, which is why the entire game is adding connections and nudging price without spooking anyone into leaving. The live pressure point is the US Cellular deal: Verizon is buying spectrum licenses to deepen coverage, and it switched the buyback back on this year after a stretch of none. The texture the marketing never shows is the several billion in network depreciation and interest that clears the books every quarter before a dollar reaches shareholders.