Earnings Bytes: Cogent, Windstream, Consolidated

Here’s a quick rundown of some of the earnings news from this week among network operators:

Cogent Communications turned in its quarterly numbers yesterday, posting revenues of $105.2M, adjusted EBITDA of $36.8M, and income of $0.06 per share. Those may have been slightly under analyst projections, but that was counterbalanced by free cash flow of $13.8M. Cogent boosted its quarterly dividend again to $0.36, continuing its ongoing pattern of steadily returning cash to shareholders. Cogent added 20 people to its headcount, and 30 to its on-net buildings count during the quarter.

Windstream posted quarterly revenues of $1.427M, adjusted OIBDAR of $503M, and earnings per share of $1.41. That last number included a large contribution from the sale of the data center business, among other things. But of more interest was the new breakdown of revenues into ILEC consumer/SMB, CLEC/SMB, Carrier, and Enterprise. Windstream’s ILEC business did $397M, it’s CLEC/SMB business did $132M, its carrier business did $171M, and the enterprise segment did $498M. The enterprise segment was the only one up over the same period last year. For 2016, Windstream projected revenues in the $5.275-5.425B range with adjusted OIBDAR of $1.90-1.95B, with lower numbers reflecting the sale of the datacenter business.

Meanwhile, Consolidated Communications reported revenue of $188.2M, adjusted EBITDA of $79.4M, and earnings per share of $0.09, which was generally mixed relative to analyst expectations. Of interest was the company’s growing emphasis on data and infrastructure in its first full year since the Enventis acquisition. During 2015, Consolidated says it grew metro Ethernet circuits by 21% and cloud voice by 17%, and they added 345 new FTT sites as well. More than offsetting that growth was typical steady churn in voice and legacy data products for the other three quarters of their business.

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Categories: CLEC · Fiber Networks · Financials · ILECs, PTTs