Virgin Mobile's warnings of a bleak quarter were pretty dead-on, with a mere 17,772 net adds coming on board during the three-month time frame ending March 31 -- not quite the blockbuster 309,721 reported in the same period a year ago. Similarly, revenue and income both took a dive, supposedly in part due to a big marketing push focused on the MVNO's new pricing plans. If there's a silver lining on the dark, rumbling cloud, though, it's that the CEO believes they'll start to see some positive growth again in the third quarter after a weak second (for his sake, we hope he's right). Also notable was a mention that although the company had no strategic partnerships, alliances, or investments to announce, it was definitely open to "non-organic growth" in the form of another MVNO or "capability." Wonder what he may have been talking about there?

[Via mocoNews]

It looks like it's a surprisingly good time to be a behemoth US carrier, with both AT&T and Verizon reporting some pretty aggressive profits in the first quarter of 2008 in the face of a flagging economy. Many of Verizon's results closely mirror AT&T's actually, with data revenue absolutely destroying the numbers from a year ago -- up 48.9 percent year over year, in Big Red's case. As we can see from Verizon's own documentation here, they're tooting their horn against their arch-nemesis with more net adds, a slightly better ARPU, lower churn, and lower cost per customer, with service revenue and total subs (of course) being AT&T's big wins. Whether the momentum can be kept up through a challenging '08 remains to be seen, but it's a solid start for the nation's number two. Hit the gallery below for a big shot of Verizon's message to employees regarding the results.

[Thanks, anonymous tipster]

The royalty, lawsuit, and chipset machine better known as Qualcomm has gone public with its digits for the second quarter of fiscal 2008, and to sum things up, it's all looking pretty rosy. At $2.61 billion, revenue was up a solid 17 percent year over year -- up 7 from the previous quarter -- and income totaled $766 million, up 6 percent year over year. That works out to 47 cents worth of diluted earnings per share, a 9 percent improvement over the same period a year ago. The MediaFLO division still isn't in the black, though, with its Qualcomm Strategic Initiatives parent reporting a loss of 2 cents per share and $76 million worth of operating expenses in the quarter, "primarily related" to the mobile TV unit. Guess there's probably a little pressure for the AT&T launch to go smoothly, swiftly, and profitably, eh? [Warning: PDF link]

[Via mocoNews]

Economic downturn and Sprint woes be damned, because AT&T's not hearin' a bit of it. The company's wireless unit -- which also happens to be the largest carrier in the country -- announced that it put up some serious numbers in the first quarter of 2008, growing revenue 18.3 percent year over year for a grand total of $11.8 billion. It tacked on 1.3 million new subscribers in the quarter, an 8.7 percent improvement in net gain over the same period in 2007, and grew ARPU by 2 percent in that time. Perhaps most eye-widening, though, is the fact that wireless data revenue grew a boggling 57.3 percent over the last year, thanks in part to the 620 million and 44 billion multimedia and text messages sent in the three-month span, respectively. Needless to say, the wireless division's looking just a little more... shall we say, "dynamic" than the wireline group at the moment, as recent job moves would indicate.

[Via mocoNews]

Well, it looks like the aggressively priced unlimited action really didn't come a moment too soon. We're no economists here, but it doesn't take rocket science, a Ph.D., collegiate level maths, or even a fancy calculator to crunch the cold, hard numbers coming out of Sprint Nextel's fourth quarter earnings call. For starters, the number three carrier in the US reported a net loss of nearly $29.5 billion, which -- get this -- is more than the combined value of its outstanding stock. Let us reiterate for emphasis and drama value: Sprint lost more money in the fourth quarter of 2007 than the company is worth. Wow. If it's any consolation, the staggering figure is largely due to a $29.7 billion write-down of Nextel's value, which as the Wall Street Journal lays out, makes the 2005 merger officially a "Deal From Hell." With postpaid subscribers continuing to migrate to other carriers, there's no telling how to stop the hemorrhaging -- especially if the fresh $99 unlimited plan doesn't end up doing the trick -- but something tells us the move to Kansas isn't going to magically patch it all up.

Nokia isn't the only manufacturer going the opposite direction of Motorola at the moment. LG managed to ship 23.7 million phones in the fourth quarter of 2007, a 40 percent improvement over the same period in 2006; following a trends across the industry, though, its revenue was up considerably less -- a mere 12 percent -- thanks to freefalling handset prices worldwide. The company says that a healthy portion of its success can be attributed to the good fortunes it has seen with Verizon's Venus and Voyager and with the Viewty throughout Europe. Things are looking good for 2008, too -- LG predicts that it'll ship a whopping 100 million handsets throughout the year, which if true would represent a 25 percent increase over 2007's numbers. As it stands, LG slides in with 7.1 percent of the global phone market share, slotting it fifth among the top five manufacturers (nothing new there) and about 2 percent behind number four, Sony Ericsson. Best of luck in the new year, dudes.

Motorola's fourth quarter and 2007 earnings turned out to be pretty bleak indeed -- as expected, perhaps -- and according to the company, it expects a further slide through the first quarter in both sales and market share. The company pulled in about $9.65 billion through the final quarter of the year, which sounds like a nice number and all until you realize that it's an 18.2 percent decline from its sales in the fourth quarter of 2006. For the full year, the company garnered $36.6 billion, down 15 percent from 2006 on the whole. In terms of handsets, Moto pushed 40.9 million of them in the quarter -- with 53 percent sold in North America -- which it estimates is good enough for 12.4 percent market share worldwide. New CEO Greg Brown said that he believes the company is aligning its strategy the way it needs to be, but that its handset business is going to take even longer to recover than expected. How far down the charts do these guys stand to slide before they're back in the black?

[Via mocoNews]

Qualcomm's proxy statement filing with the SEC last week revealed some juicy tidbits regarding subsidiary MediaFLO USA's performance in fiscal year 2007, and as might be expected, the numbers aren't so hot. The mobile TV outfit's revenue isn't broken down specifically, but Qualcomm calls it out as largely accounting for its QSI (Qualcomm Strategic Initiatives) segment's poor '07 showing thanks to a $118 million year over year increase in losses. To be fair, MediaFLO launched for the first time anywhere on any carrier in 2007, and the statement blames $70 million of those losses on expenses associated with the March '07 rollout on Verizon -- but these cats have another big push coming up with AT&T, and we can't imagine that service launches are getting any cheaper these days. Hopefully the economies of scale start to kick in before too long and put 'em on the road to black ink.

[Via mocoNews]

Corporate denials are about as ironclad as the existence of the Nokia N97, but take this for what it's worth: HTC says "no worries" in response to rumors that Qualcomm's chipset deliveries would be coming up short next quarter. Though the firm -- known by most as the world's foremost Windows Mobile powerhouse -- admits that component supplies are tight, it says that it has secured all the stuff it needs to keep its own production humming along at full steam. For its part, Qualcomm says that it has been working closely with HTC "week by week" to keep the flow of supplies steady, and that it'll be ramping up production of its WCDMA silicon in January to better accommodate demand. So much for worries about Broadcom breathing down their neck, apparently!

[Thanks, Tom]

Qualcomm's a little down on its luck right now -- its legal luck, anyway -- and needless to say, we wouldn't want to be a company relying on its goods right now to be able to turn a profit of our own. That's exactly the situation HTC apparently finds itself in according to Taiwan's Commercial Times, expecting to book about 38.5 percent less revenue in the first fiscal quarter of '08 than in the fourth quarter of this year thanks to a supply of Qualcomm chipsets that falls well short of HTC's needs. HTC expects to receive about 70 percent of the CDMA and WCDMA silicon that it needs, ultimately affecting phone shipments to both the US and Europe. The only thing better than a delayed phone is a released phone that's in impossibly short supply, so this should be a fun few months coming up here.

[Via Just Another Mobile Phone Blog]

Just as forecasted, Research in Motion has delivered quite the Wall Street-pleasing results in the fiscal third-quarter. The BlackBerry maker's recently released numbers showed a staggering $370.5 million profit compared to "just" $175.2 million in the same quarter last year. Furthermore, the firm's Q3 revenue rose to $1.67 billion from $835.1 million last year. According to co-CEO Jim Balsillie, it's pretty "clear [that] BlackBerry smartphones have crossed over from being viewed as a primarily enterprise product to being marketed as a strong mainstream offering," and considering the results, it's hard to argue that point. Oh, and just in case you haven't seen enough digits in one post, it should be noted that RIM shipped out more than 3.9 million handsets and added around 1.65 million BlackBerry subscribers in Q3, also. Not too shabby, eh?

Sprint's recent second quarter financial results showed an interesting mix of numbers: income dropped by 90 percent, wireless data revenue jumped by 40 percent and the carrier broke the 54 million-customer mark. Dropping from a $291 million profit in the year-ago quarter to a $19 million profit is, well, pretty huge. But, at least Sprint saw its average revenue per sub sit above $60 for its latest quarter, with $9.75 attributable to data revenue. Everyone break out some EV-DO data sessions in salute of this if you please. On a lighter note, Sprint CEO Gary Foresee said the iPhone "blip" has not significantly affected number ports to AT&T, although the level is up "slightly" from before the iPhone launch.

[via mocoNews]

Okay, look, we seriously don't support laughing at Moto's misfortunes, and that's the truth -- but they just made it too easy here. Above is a screen shot of AP's brief about the sitch as it appeared for us on Yahoo! News. How better to compliment a MOTOSTRY than with a MOTOADVT, right? The ad here is encouraging us to get our news right on our V3xx, even if said news has to do with Motorola's bleak outlook for fiscal '07, apparently. Come on, if you don't get a good belly laugh out of that, you need to check your pulse... so yeah, anyway, the post-RAZR hangover continues at Moto, with CFO David Devonshire "retiring" to make way for Thomas Meredeth effective April Fools' Day. Profit forecasts are also continuing to follow their downward trend, with the first quarter now expected to rake in revenues of $9.2 to 9.3 billion, down from the $10.4 to 10.6 billion quoted just two short months ago. CEO Zander himself blames much of the shortfall on competitors' price pressures in the low-end segment; personally, we blame the shortfall on the fact that we still don't have a frickin' MOTORIZR Z8 in our hands, but what do we know?

Despite a $15 billion sale of Vodafone Japan to Softbank, Vodafone proper managed to lose some $40.7 billion in the fiscal year ending March 31, making it the largest single full-year loss in history for any British company. The world's #2 operator blamed writeoffs and stiff European competition, but another contributing factor could be Vodafone's ongoing trend of hemorrhaging much of their revenue in the form of dividends -- over $10 billion of the Japan sale, for example, was returned directly to shareholders. We know they're denying it, but is a sale of Vodafone's stake in Verizon starting to look appealing? Or is Vodafone itself looking ripe for the picking?