Hey, who says everyone loses during tough times? After Virgin Mobile USA crawled through a miserable Q2, things are looking up for the recent acquirer of Helio. The outfit reported 821,491 gross additions to its subscriber list, which marks a respectable 8% year-over-year increase. Furthermore, the company somehow managed to amass a Q3 net profit of $4.1 million, which contrasts starkly with the $7.4 million loss that it posted a year ago. The only down news of the day was that its average revenue per user in the third quarter fell 2% from a year earlier to $20.19, but given that its Q4 forecast shows it notching a revenue increase from 6% to 9%, we suppose it's all good in the neighborhood.

[Via RCRWireless]

We can't recall the last time a mega-corp informed the public that it had a "good" quarter (as in, it literally described the quarter as "good" in its headline), but we can't help but chuckle at this one. Deutsche Telekom has done what few other companies have managed to do of late, and that's post an impressive Q3. Even in a "difficult market environment," net income was up €0.6 billion ($775 million) to €0.9 billion ($1.16 billion) compared to a year ago, and it managed to snag 670,000 new T-Mobile USA customers all the while. As with most other carriers these days, DT also found lots of income flowing in from data usage; total data revenue (excluding messaging) was up 28.3% to a whopping €639 million ($825 million). For number crunchers and optimists alike, tap the read link for more material you're sure to love.

[Via mocoNews]

Sprint's year just keeps getting worse. After losing over 900,000 customers last quarter while posting a $344 million loss, the company insistent on advertising with faux soap operas and in black and white (and yellow) is hanging its head once more. During Q3, the carrier saw 1.3 million net subscribers head for the exits, and it also reported a loss of $326 million. According to CEO Dan Hesse, Sprint "has yet to turn the corner," warning that the process of turning things around would be gradual. Moving forward, the company expects gross additions to "stabilize," while the turnover rate is apt to remain at around 2.15%. In related news, the provider's stock price has sunk around 60% in the past six months, and while that's surely bad news to shareholders, not many other mega-corps out there are doing tremendously better.

[Via The New York Times]

Nah, Softbank Mobile's launch of the iPhone isn't entirely to thank for the carrier notching record operating profits this quarter, but it certainly didn't hurt matters. Noting that Apple's darling "pulled in more mobile subscribers," the company reported an operating profit of ¥180 billion ($1.85 billion), though net profit did slide 11.5% to ¥41.1 billion ($422.2 million). In fact, Softbank president Masayoshi Son proclaimed that he used an iPhone every day, telling the press that it was "useful, and the more that [he] uses it, the better [he] understands its strong points." Of note, the operator's retention of mobile phone customers "has also improved with the iPhone," and while income from voice calls continues to drop, earnings from data services were on the up and up. Data, kids -- that's the future!

[Via mocoNews]

While many industries are going through a bit of a rough patch (to put things mildly), both AT&T and Verizon are soaking up the sun. Or maybe that's just the beaming glow being emitted from their respective Q3 reports. Either way, AT&T reported a 2.0 million net gain in total wireless subscribers on the coattails of 2.4 million iPhone 3G activations, while it notched a 50.5% uptick in wireless data revenues and saw overall wireless revenues increase by 15.4%. As for Verizon Wireless, it witnessed 1.5 million net customer additions (excluding the 630,000 customers pulled in from its Rural Cellular acquisition), and it noted that data revenues -- which now comprise over a fourth of all service revenue -- shot up 42.5% to $2.8 billion. For numbers galore explaining just how well the pair did this past quarter, mount up your reading glasses and hit the links below.

[Via mocoNews]

Read - Verizon Q3 2008 earnings report
Read - AT&T Q3 2008 earnings report

Man, what a difference a year makes. Almost 12 months ago to the day, the suits in Espoo were celebrating with extreme joviality after seeing profits soar a whopping 85% to $2.2 billion. Today, those same folks (plus / minus a few) are hanging their heads along with just about every other mega-corp on the planet. As credit tightens and the economy slows around the globe, people have apparently decided that another shiny new Nokia probably shouldn't be numero uno on the priority list. To that end, Nokia saw its net income sink 30% to around $1.47 billion while sales slipped 5% and market share fell ever-so-slightly to 38% (from 40% in January). Granted, it's not like Nokia didn't warn us that this was coming, but we're sure that doesn't make things any easier to swallow for shareholders. At least the gift giving season is just around the bend, right? Happy thoughts, happy thoughts.

[Via mocoNews]

2008 has generally treated Espoo pretty well, but every rose has its thorn -- and for Nokia, that thorn might just end up being the third quarter. The company has now revised its Q3 market share estimate downward, now predicting a slip from Q2 rather than the flat line it'd been suggesting before; cited reasons include a "tactical decision to not meet certain aggressive pricing of some competitors," generally fierce competition (particularly on the low end), and the delayed launch of an unnamed midrange handset. In justifying its failure to meet market pricing head-on in every market segment, Nokia says it's only going to play that game where it thinks it's profitable to do so, and for what it's worth, it still expects to ship about 10 percent more devices in 2008 than it did in 2007. What's more, they say they expect to meet the rest of their expected launch dates in '08 -- so it looks like every night has its dawn after all.

[Via mocoNews]

It's amazing the kinds of neat things that can happen once you manage to turn lemons into even just a drop or two of bittersweet lemonade. Take Motorola, for example: a manufacturer that's fallen on hard times by even the loosest definitions manages to turn a sliver of profit for itself, and boom, suddenly you've got yourself a shiny new CEO and a smiling analyst or two. Jim Suva of Citi Investments seems to be going to bat for Moto at a time when everyone was just about ready to abandon ship, saying that the most recent earnings announcement represented the "early innings a gradual steady improvement", expressing confidence that new CEO Jha's hiring was a good thing, and hooking up the company's stock with a "buy" rating. 'Round here, we judge a company's success mainly by the greatness of its hardware, but you need solid financials to fund the R&D to make said hardware happen -- so we suppose this really could be a solid start to a genuine turnaround.

The sad part of Virgin Mobile's Q2 earnings story is that it lost customers (to the tune of some 111,000), saw ARPU slide from $20.97 to $19.32 year over year, and watched its profits get halved over the same period to a slim $3.5 million. The happy part? Hey, at least they're in the black, and we're sure they'd rather break even than hemorrhage cash the way virtually all of their MVNO brethren have. At any rate, the company thinks that it'll turn things around heading into '09 with the addition of Helio to its portfolio, which it confirms will be leveraged to offer "new data services and feature-rich handsets" -- both concepts that bare-bones Virgin isn't accustomed to offering in the States. The Ocean 2 would be a nice way to kick off that plan, would it not?

Alltel announced its second quarter earnings this week, and first, the bad news: despite a 10 percent improvement in revenue year over year, the number five carrier actually lost $69.9 million, thanks largely to increases in interest costs on its debt and write offs associated with the absorption of an affiliate last year. Now, onto the good news: like most of its competitors, Alltel saw huge gains in data revenue over the same period -- some 45 percent, to be exact, or $8.18 out of the $54.42 ARPU they're currently posting. They've also added close to 320,000 net subscribers in the quarter, so all things considered, we've got to believe Verizon's still happy with its investment -- assuming it ends up going through, of course.

It's starting to sound like a broken record, and for American carriers, that's a good thing: there are plenty of new subscribers hopping on board, and they're doing more mobile browsing than ever before. T-Mobile added about 668,000 net subscribers in the second quarter -- down from nearly a million in the first, but hey, net new subs are a good thing any way you look at it. Those adds now put T-Mobile at about 31.5 million customers in total, a distant fourth behind AT&T, Verizon, and Sprint (less than half of either AT&T's or Verizon's base, in fact). As number one and number two both reported, there's been a huge jump in data revenue year over year -- 31.5 percent, to be exact, with much of the cash flowing from messaging services. Feeling a little left out of the new subscriber party here, Sprint?

How does that saying go? For every action, there must be an equal and opposite reaction, right? Well, to that end, Sprint seems to be the "equal and opposite reaction" to AT&T's and Verizon's actions, posting a net subscriber loss and a stable ARPU at a time when its competitors are posting huge net adds and rising ARPUs. Year over year, The Now Network has hemorrhaged 2.1 million customers, 901,000 of whom bolted in this quarter alone in a $344 million vat of red ink; what's worse, it says losses will increase in the next due to a "seasonal uptick in churn." That doesn't really compute, unless Sprint is actively suggesting that people are more likely to leave its network in the third quarter of the year -- but we obviously understand the need to come up with interesting and creative excuses for bad news when it comes to an ugly earnings report. Any way you slice it, the big boys seem to be eating Sprint's lunch at the moment without a clear-cut path to turning the tables. The silver lining, we guess, is that analysts had expected 906,000 customers to bolt, a full 5,000 more than actually left -- but unless those 5,000 are each holding $1 million-per-month accounts, there's not much of a diff there.

[Via mocoNews]

Seen exclusively, an 8.1% rise in operating profit is pretty remarkable. But when you consider that rival NTT DoCoMo just posted a 41% boost in profits... well, you get the point. Unsurprisingly, Softbank was able to increase its profits by reducing the amount of subsidies it applied to phones -- which obviously led to fewer new handset sales overall -- but analysts were still perturbed by the amount of discounts it did hand over. Reportedly, the street was expecting operating profits to top ¥86.1 billion ($805.7 million), but the outfit wound up missing the mark by a cool billion yen ($9.36 million). As for the iPhone 3G influence? Gotta wait 'til next quarter, bub.

[Via mocoNews]

It doesn't take a finance major to figure out these two things are correlated, but yes, the fact that NTT DoCoMo saw profits increase some 41% while handset sales across Japan plummeted 20% do in fact have a common link. You see, DoCoMo (among others) has decided to lower rates and reduce subsidies in order to better exploit market conditions; the end result is that consumers are buying new handsets less often, leading to decreased sales for firms like Sharp and Matsushita. Many analysts are suggesting that some of the smaller outfits are likely to band together in an attempt to take on the new market, with IDC analyst Michito Kimura proclaiming that Japan would have "fewer mobile phone makers, fewer handset sales agents and fewer cellphone models." Hard to say if that's a net positive or negative just yet, but it should be interesting to watch, regardless.

[Via mocoNews, image courtesy of Flickr]

It has been a solid tick since Motorola had a quarterly earnings report that it didn't just send over via the paper airplane method and run for the hills, but the most recent one was actually worth cracking a smile over. After moving more mobiles in North America than it expected too, shares shot up 13% and bullish analysts began to think that the worst was over. Chief Executive Greg Brown noted that Moto will be "adding substantially to its product portfolio" here in the near future, which will hopefully enable it to get a stronger grasp on the number 3 handset maker ranking. During the most recent quarter, the outfit shipped 28.1 million phones to just barely maintain its market share lead over LG, though it remains to be seen if it can keep this up. No pressure Moto, no pressure at all.

[Via RCRWireless]