earnings

Update 7:22 a.m. PDT: This story was updated with comments and information from the company's conference call.

Sprint Nextel is blaming the economy for a steep decline in subscribers, though its prepaid and wholesale businesses are seen as important growth areas as the company faces stiff competition.

Meanwhile, financial losses mounted in Sprint's first-quarter earnings released Monday.

"We are happy about the success of Boost Unlimited (prepaid, no-contract service) and our wholesale business," Dan Hesse, Sprint's CEO said during a conference call with analysts and investors on Monday. "But the economy has … Read more

For an industry that's supposedly struggling to keep up with customer demand for more bandwidth, the nation's two largest cable operators seem to be doing pretty well.

This week Comcast and Time Warner Cable each reported strong earnings, in spite of the fact that Time Warner has said recently that it needs a new business model to handle growing broadband demand.

Comcast beat analysts' expectations and increased profits 5.4 percent to $778 million. Time Warner Cable's profits fell 32 percent, but this was mostly due to costs associated with the split from its former parent company, … Read more

Motorola continued to lose money during the first quarter of 2009 as shipments for wireless handsets declined amid the ailing economy.

The company was already in pretty bad shape when the global economy started to tank last year. And since then, things have continued to get worse. Without any cool new handsets and with dropping demand from customers, Motorola's troubled handset business continues to drag the company down.

During the first quarter, which ended April 4, Motorola reported that shipments of cell phones fell about 46 percent to 14.7 million compared with the same quarter a year before. … Read more

EarthLink beat analyst expectations for the first quarter of 2009 as fewer customers dumped its Internet service.

The company, which provides dial-up and broadband Internet service, said first quarter profits fell to $32.5 million, or 30 cents a share, from $51.7 million, or 47 cents a share, a year earlier. Revenue was down 24 percent to $199.1 million.

But these results beat analysts' expectations. Analysts polled by Reuters expected earnings of 27 cents a share, excluding exceptional items, on revenue of $202.4 million.

EarthLink is still losing dial-up Internet users. But it appears that rate is … Read more

Updated 7:20 a.m. PDT with information from the conference call.

Verizon Communications saw earnings grow 5.3 percent in the first quarter, helped by its acquisition of Alltel. But wireless competition is heating up with AT&T, which saw strong growth due to the iPhone.

For the three months ended March 31, Verizon reported net income of $3.2 billion, or 58 cents a share, barely beating last year's earnings of $3.0 billion, or 58 cents a year. Revenue was up about 12 percent, to $26.6 billion, largely due to the acquisition of regional … Read more

After reporting its first-ever quarter in which sales dropped from the year-earlier period, Microsoft had more distressing news for investors.

In an earnings call with financial analysts, Microsoft Chief Financial Officer Chris Liddell warned that things continue to look tough in the global economy, describing the conditions as the worst in the company's 30-year history.

"We remain more cautious than most about the state of the world economy," Liddell said. "Economic pressures are broad and deep."

His comments are in contrast to statements by executives at EMC and Intel, who held out hope that the … Read more

As analysts predicted it might, Microsoft on Thursday reported the company's first ever year-over-year sales decline for the quarter ended March 31.

The software maker said fiscal third-quarter sales totaled $13.65 billion, down 6 percent compared with $14.45 billion in the same quarter a year ago. Its per-share earnings were 33 cents per share, although that included severance and investment impairment charges that reduced earnings by 6 cents per share.

Analysts had been projecting sales of $14.15 billion and per-share earnings of 39 cents, down from 47 cents a year ago, according to Reuters Estimates.

Microsoft … Read more

This was originally posted at ZDNet's Between the Lines.

EMC Chief Executive Joe Tucci on Thursday said the storage giant expects technology spending in the second half of the fiscal year to improve, and it noted that the worst is largely over.

Tucci's comments came amid EMC's earnings, which met expectations. In a statement, Tucci said:

As we look to the balance of 2009, we believe the global IT-spending environment has reached, or is very near, the bottom. We expect IT spending to improve in the second half of 2009, as customers will have better budget visibility, … Read more

This was originally posted at ZDNet's Between the Lines.

eBay's first-quarter results were better than expected, and the company argued that it is operating with more discipline and smarter.

For the quarter ended March 31 (statement), the company reported net income of $357.1 million, or 28 cents a share, on revenue of $2.02 billion, down $171.6 million from a year ago due to poor performance in its marketplaces unit. On a non-GAAP basis, eBay reported first-quarter earnings of $499.9 million, or 39 cents a share.

Wall Street was expecting earnings of 33 cents a … Read more