In Other Earnings News

The earnings reports came so thick this week I couldn’t dedicate a post to each one.  Here are a few comments about the rest of the field.

q warned earlier this month that their revenues would be light, and at $3.17B they were – but it wasn’t anything shocking.  Landlines fell to 11.2M, which shocked no one.  Through the aggressive cost cutting that has been sweeping the whole sector they were able to grow earnings per share to $0.12, which seems to have pleased the market.  Will they sell the longhaul network?  Mum’s the word so far.

Akamai (NASDAQ:AKAM, news, filings) checked in with a slight sequential revenue decline and slightly better than expected earnings.  They also announced a $100M stock buyback, which means that either they think their stock is cheap or they can’t find anything else to spend their cash on.  Probably both, come to think of it.  Regardless, the market seemed happy.  They also started positioning themselves in the cloud of course, and we probably haven’t heard the end of that.

cbey reported yesterday after the bell, with a basically in-line quarter, with revenues of $98.3 and earnings per share of $0.00.  They narrowed revenue guidance to the lower half of the previous range, citing higher churn levels which reached 1.5% in the first quarter – which seems to have put some people off.  Personally, I’m impressed CBeyond has weathered the recession so well thus far – I had expected churn to be much worse.

CenturyLink (NYSE:CTL, news, filings) reported adjusted earnings of $0.82 and forecast a nice boring $0.77-0.81 in Q2.  Landline losses were 7% over the last year, which is smaller than at its larger ILEC cousins only because of its more rural turf – less competition and all that.  Nobody was terribly surprised by any of this of course.  Everyone is just waiting for the Embarq deal to complete in order to get a look at the combined company.

Lo and behold, the sky actually hasn’t fallen!  For the depths of a killer recession, this has been pretty mild so far in the telecom and internet infrastructure sectors.  That’s reason enough for celebration, but let’s wait until we hear from the rest of the field next week to call off the economic deathwatch.

If you haven't already, please take our Reader Survey! Just 3 questions to help us better understand who is reading Telecom Ramblings so we can serve you better!

Categories: CLEC · Content Distribution · Financials · ILECs, PTTs