For Immediate Release

Chicago, IL – October 30, 2009 – Zacks.com announces the list of stocks featured in the Analyst Blog. Every day the Zacks Equity Research analysts discuss the latest news and events impacting stocks and the financial markets. Stocks recently featured in the blog include: Sprint Nextel (S), Virgin Mobile USA (VM), iPCS Inc (IPCS), Verizon (VZ) and AT&T (T).

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Here are highlights from Thursday’s AnalystBlog:

Sprint Posts Bigger Loss

Sprint Nextel (S) reported third-quarter 2009 results with net loss per share of 17 cents, exceeding the Zacks Consensus Estimate of 15 cents and the year-ago loss per share of 11 cents.

The third-largest US wireless carrier posted a net loss of $478 million, 47%

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Sprint Nextel (S) reported third-quarter 2009 results with net loss per share of 17 cents, exceeding the Zacks Consensus Estimate of 15 cents and the year-ago loss per share of 11 cents. The third-largest US wireless carrier posted a net loss of $478 million, 47% more than the net loss of $326 million reported a year ago. Sprint remains significantly challenged by the volatile economic backdrop, which has contributed to the sustained decline in the wireless subscriber base and associated revenues. Operating revenue fell 9% year over year to $8 billion due to lower contributions from its wireline and post-paid wireless businesses. The company reported adjusted OIBDA of $1.5 billion for the quarter, down 17% year over year, due to decreased operating revenue partly offset by lower SG&A expenses. Wireless Consolidated revenue from the wireless segment was $6.9 billion, down 8% year over year, ...

America Movil (AMX) reported results for third-quarter 2009 with earnings per ADS of 86 cents edging past the Zacks Consensus Estimates of 85 cents while increasing 22.6% from the year-ago earnings per ADS of 70 cents. Net profit surged 50.6% year over year to 18.7 billion pesos (US$1.4 billion) or 0.57 pesos per share. This healthy growth was fuelled by higher revenue and lower financing costs which fell 82.5% year over year due to gains stemming from favorable exchange rate swings.  Revenue & EBITDA Latin America’s largest wireless carrier continues to register a double-digit revenue growth as evident from the 16.9% year over year increase in consolidated revenue in the quarter to 99.8 billion pesos (US$7.5 billion), driven by 19.5% growth in service revenue. Revenue growth was supported by healthy business momentum across 3G wireless and broadband Internet businesses.  Consolidated EBITDA for the quarter was 40.4 ...

Deutsche Telekom (DT), the largest telecom carrier in Germany, is entering the Indian Internet market in the near future. The European telecom giant recently acquired 17% stake in the Indian telecom operator Devas Multimedia for approximately $75 million. In collaboration with Devas, Deutsche Telekom will offer high capacity radio network based Internet services in the metropolitan areas of India starting from 2010.

The company's expansion initiative into the lucrative Indian telecom market is the result of limited growth opportunity in the mature core European and U.S. markets. Deutsche Telekom's focus recently shifted to the under-penetrated emerging economies in Asia and Africa given the significant potential for growth in these nascent markets.

Deutsche Telekom continues to face a weak economy with further erosion in German fixed-line telephony business due to intense competition. The company is trying to offset declining fixed-line revenue with growth across broadband Internet and wireless.

The Indian telecom market is

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Qwest Communications (Q) announced yesterday the discountinuation of its wireless operation (Qwest Wireless) effective October 31, 2009. The Denver-based telecom operator has reportedly started to circulate a 60-day notice to its susbsribers to migrate to alternative service providers. Customers can switch networks without paying any contract termination fees while retaining there existing contact numbers. Since 2004, Qwest has been marketing Sprint Nextel’s (S) products and services under its own brand by operating as a mobile virtual network operator (MVNO) on Sprint’s CDMA wireless network and recognized revenue on gross basis.   However, the company ended its partnership with Sprint (effective February 2009) and entered into a five-year agreement with Verizon (VZ) in May 2008. Under this new arrangement, Qwest started reselling Verizon Wireless’s products and services (under the Verizon brand) from the third-quarter 2008 and books revenue on net basis. The company is currently ...

After the market close on July 21, 2009, Latin America’s largest wireless carrier America Movil (AMX) reported financial results for the second quarter of 2009. Net profit overflowed both consensus and our expectations surging 27.5% year-over-year to 22.5 billion pesos (US$1.7 billion) or 0.69 pesos (US$1.03) per share. This healthy growth was fuelled by higher revenue, lower subscriber retention costs and foreign exchange gains of 4.8 billion pesos (US$360 million) stemming from the appreciation of Mexican peso against the US dollar.  America Movil continues to register double-digit revenue growth as evident from the 11% year-over-year increase in consolidated revenue in the second quarter to 94 billion pesos (US$7 billion), backed by 15.9% growth in service revenue.  The company’s largest market Mexico posted 2.9% year-over-year growth in revenues to 34.9 billion pesos (US$2.6 billion). Mexican ARPU (average revenue per user) declined from the year-ago quarter while reported ...

When most investors think of the telecom sector and wireless providers, Verizon [VZ: 28.62, -0.02 (-0.07%)] and AT&T [T: 23.44, +0.06 (+0.26%)] come to mind first.  These two companies form a duopoly of the domestic market.  Market penetration is nearing 90% in the US, so growth is limited, as these two companies are forced to compete for existing clients to survive as well as continue to steal market share from Sprint-Nextel [S: 4.36, -0.10 (-2.24%)] and T-Mobile.  They are also attempting to jump into unique markets everyday in hopes of adding revenue and improving margins. For instance, VZ and T have been rolling out fiber optic backbones for even faster internet speeds and enhanced TV picture quality. While this appears to be the new generation and face of telecom, there is one company that

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The world is seeing a move to on-demand information and mobile computing, evident by the explosion of smartphones in recent years.  Furthermore, bandwidth demand has increased drastically as more people are emailing, texting, downloading applications and watching YouTube on their cell phones, thus requiring networks to be upgraded accordingly.  Mobile networks have been upgraded both domestically and internationally to 3G and will eventually be revamped up to 4G.  In the home, cable networks have been upgraded from coaxial cables to fiber optics by companies like AT&T [T: 24.79, +0.16 (+0.65%)] and Verizon [VZ: 29.26, -0.01 (-0.03%)] to gain access to more HD channels and faster, more reliable internet connections. There has also been a shift on the consumer front as wireless companies have been rolling out unlimited prepaid plans favoring consumers looking to trade down and cut costs in this tumultuous economic environment.  I’ll give a

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MTN Nigeria, the country’s largest cellco by subscribers and part of South Africa’s MTN (which has 70 million customers in 21 countries), will invest at least US$1.5 billion on its network this year in order to boost its carrying capacity and to improve the quality of service on its network, according to its Corporate Service, Wale Goodluck.  MTN Nigeria has invested in building up transmission networks over the past four years in order to make up for the country’s lack of telecoms infrastructure, said Goodluck, who went on to note that the firm’s wireless subscriber base has grown rapidly over the past three years.  In fact, according to TeleGeography’s GlobalComms database, the company had 20.17 million customers in September 2008, up from 14.95 million a year earlier.

Per various reports, Nigeria’s …