Description
Verizon Communications is an American multinational telecommunications conglomerate and a corporate component of the Dow Jones Industrial Average. The company is headquartered at 1095 Avenue of the Americas in Midtown Manhattan, New York City, but is incorporated in Delaware.
In 1984, the United States Department of Justice mandated AT&T Corporation to break up the Bell System into seven companies, each a Regional Bell Operating Company (RBOC), commonly referred to as "Baby Bells". Bell Atlantic, one of the Baby Bells, came into existence the same year, consisting of the separate operating companies New Jersey Bell, Bell of Pennsylvania, Diamond State Telephone, and C&P Telephone, with a trading area from New Jersey to Virginia.
As part of a rebranding of the Baby Bells in the mid-1990s, all of Bell Atlantic's operating companies assumed the holding company's name. In 1997, Bell Atlantic expanded into New York and the New England states by merging with fellow Baby Bell NYNEX. Bell Atlantic was the surviving company name, and the merged company moved its headquarters from Philadelphia to NYNEX's old headquarters in New York City. In 2000, Bell Atlantic acquired GTE, which operated telecommunications companies across most of the rest of the country that was not already in Bell Atlantic's footprint. Bell Atlantic, the surviving entity, changed its name to Verizon, a portmanteau of veritas (Latin for "truth") and horizon.
In 2015, Verizon expanded into content ownership by acquiring AOL, and two years later, it acquired Yahoo!. AOL and Yahoo were amalgamated into a new division named Oath Inc., which was rebranded as Verizon Media in January 2019, and was spun off and rebranded to Yahoo! after its sale to Apollo Global Management.
As of 2016, Verizon is one of three remaining companies with roots in the former Baby Bells. The other two, like Verizon, exist as a result of mergers among fellow former Baby Bell members. SBC Communications bought the Bells' former parent AT&T Corporation and took on the AT&T name, and CenturyLink acquired Qwest (formerly US West) in 2011 and later became Lumen Technologies in 2020.
Verizon's mobile network is the second-largest wireless carrier in the United States, with 120.9 million subscribers as of the end of Q4 2020. And as of 2017, Verizon is the only publicly traded telecommunications company that has two stock listings in its home country, both the NYSE (principal) and NASDAQ (secondary). As of 2017, it is also the second largest telecommunications company by revenue after AT&T.
