Bracing For Sprint Earnings (S, CLWR, DRWI)

Sprint Nextel Corporation (NYSE: S) is set to report its fourth quarter earnings on Wednesday and investors are wondering how the company can fix its situation.  Without casting judgment without seeing the iPhone sales, this is a situation that many investors feel is an at-risk situation.  Sprint has a history of beating lowered numbers, and frankly it always feels like the bar is set real low rather than real high.  That might feel odd if you just look at a long-term chart and saw the loss of shareholder value here.

Sprint started to sell the iPhone in mid-October.  We are looking for a higher average revenue per user and we are hoping for a lower churn.  If churn is up at the same time that the iPhone came on then there is some serious explaining that has to be done. A risk is the iPhone subsidy and the long-term funding issues are not helping matters.

Estimates from Thomson Reuters are -$0.37 EPS on $8.68 billion in sales.  The stock is up almost 5% at $2.43 late-Monday right before the closing bell but this one is bouncing off of recent 52-week lows.  The new 52-week range is $2.10 to $6.45.

We will be watching Clearwire Corporation (NASDAQ: CLWR) for funding overlaps and for a secondary news move on the situation.  After that, we will be watching DragonWave Inc. (NASDAQ: DRWI) for partial relevance on buildouts as Sprint discusses its 2012 capital spending plans.