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Alltel earnings jump more than 50 percent Friday, Aug 5, 2005 By Wesley Brown Arkansas News Bureau LITTLE ROCK - Just days after completing a $6.5 billion acquisition, Alltel Corp. on Thursday reported that second-quarter profits were 53 percent better than last year. The company's booming wireless business, proceeds from the sale of its Alltel's former financial services group and a swap of assets between the Little Rock phone giant and Cingular Wireless boosted the company's quarterly results, officials said. "Alltel's wireless business delivered another strong performance ...," Alltel President and CEO Scott Ford said in a statement. "We are very pleased with the way our business has performed over the first half of the year and excited about the prospects for continued growth with the completion of the Western Wireless merger." For the period that ended June 30, the company reported net income of $1.27 per share or $402 million, compared to earnings of $262.5 million or 85 cents a year ago. Earnings from current business, which exclude one-time prepayment costs associated with a $450 million bond debt, came in at 90 cents, 6 percent better than the same period a year ago. Total revenues for the quarter were $2.3 billion, an 11 percent increase from a year ago. Wall Street had expected the Arkansas wireless giant to report earnings of 85 cents per share, according to Thomson First Call. Overall, Alltel's wireless sales accounted for the lion's share of the company's revenue and earnings. Wireless revenue rose 16 percent to $1.5 billion, while profits from the cell phone business increased 17 percent to $307 million. However, Alltel's wireline revenue fell 2 percent to $595 million, although the company added 36,000 new broadband customers. Alltel's cash flow from current businesses was $260 million. On Monday, Alltel completed its $6.5 billion stock-and-cash acquisition of Western Wireless, creating the nation's largest rural wireless provider with 10 million customers in 34 states. Alltel officials said the combining of the rural phone giants will create more than 130 new jobs at the company's corporate offices in Little Rock, mostly in the areas of customer service, engineering, accounting and sales and marketing. Still, Alltel does plan to lay off some Western Wireless employees at that company's former headquarters in Bellevue, Wash. Alltel also plans to go ahead with the sale of Western Wireless' international operations in Ireland and Austria, which company officials say could be sold for as much as $2 billion. Alltel's shares closed Thursday at $64.10, down 1.53 or 2.33 percent. More than 2.6 million shares traded hands. |
