Hot Off the Wire – Sprint slows subscriber exodus; Opera plans iPhone browser app; Micron buys chip rival; PayPal extends India suspension
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A roundup of the latest high-tech news from The Associated Press:
• Sprint cuts subscriber losses
NEW YORK — Sprint Nextel Corp.'s subscriber losses slowed in the fourth quarter, an encouraging sign for a wireless carrier that has lost millions of customers over the past few years.
Sprint lost a net 148,000 subscribers in the last three months of 2009, far fewer than the 545,000 who fled in the third quarter, the carrier said Wednesday.
Sprint reported a quarterly loss of $980 million, or 34 cents per share, for the last three months of 2009. That compares with a loss of $1.62 billion, or 57 cents per share, a year earlier.
Analysts were expecting a loss of 19 cents per share, but that figure did not include the effects of a noncash $306 million tax charge. Sprint did not provide a per-share figure comparable to the analyst estimate.
Revenue slipped 7 percent to $7.87 billion, slightly below the $8 billion expected by analysts surveyed by Thomson Reuters.
Most of the improvement in customer figures comes from Sprint's Boost Mobile and Virgin Mobile USA prepaid services, which added 435,000 customers during the quarter. The Sprint-branded service also stemmed losses, adding a net 3,000 customers.
Sprint, which is based in Overland Park, Kan., ended the year with 48.1 million customers, down from 49.3 million the year before. It's the third-largest carrier in the country.
• Opera Software plans iPhone app for its browser
OSLO — Opera Software ASA announced Wednesday that it will unveil an iPhone version of its Opera Mini mobile phone browser at an international tech conference next week despite not having approached iPhone maker Apple about the move.
The Norwegian firm has not set a release date for its iPhone browser and has not yet sought approval to distribute the browser from Apple's iPhone applications store, Opera spokeswoman Katrin Jaakson said.
But Jaakson said Opera "does not see any reason why it wouldn't be accepted. We obviously hope that Apple will not deny their users a choice when it comes to what browser they use."
The iPhone's default browser is the Apple-developed Safari.
Currently, Opera offers its Mini browser for free. The browser has become known for its ability to compress full Web sites for mobile use, allowing quicker Internet access than regular browser and lower user costs because it requires less bandwidth.
Opera will present its iPhone browser at the 2010 Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain, which will run from Feb. 15-18.
In the late 90s and early 2000s, the Opera desktop browser was a strong alternative to Microsoft Corp.'s Internet Explorer and Time Warner Inc.'s Netscape. But its popularity has diminished with the rise of Netscape's successor, Mozilla's Firefox.
• PayPal’s India suspension could last months
SAN FRANCISCO — Online payments service PayPal says its suspension of certain transactions in India could last months.
In a post on PayPal's blog Tuesday, spokesman Anuj Nayar wrote that the company will keep blocking personal payments to and from India as it works out questions that Indian regulators have posed. The payments were initially suspended Jan. 28, after regulators questioned whether PayPal payments should be regulated like wire transfers of cash.
However, local bank withdrawals, which had also been suspended, should be available within a few days, Nayar said.
The size of PayPal's India business is not publicly disclosed, but it appears to be relatively small. In 2008, $4 billion of PayPal's $60 billion in transactions came from the region it defines as Asia, and the vast majority was from Australia, PayPal's fourth-largest market.
PayPal is part of eBay Inc.
• Micron Technologies buys Numonyx for $1.27 billion
BOISE, Idaho — Micron Technology says it plans to buy fellow memory chip maker Numonyx in an all-stock transaction the companies value at $1.27 billion.
Micron plans to issue 140 million shares to Numonyx shareholders, Francisco Partners and chip makers Intel Corp. and STMicroelectronics NV. Numonyx was created by the three companies in 2008.
Micron will issue up to 10 million additional shares to Numonyx shareholders, depending on Micron's average share price for 20 trading days. The transaction is expected to close within three to six months pending regulatory approval, Micron says.
Micron expects the transaction to add to its earnings beginning in 2011.
Micron, based in Boise, Idaho, makes memory chips for mobile phones, cameras and other electronics.
Copyright 2010 Local Tech Wire. All rights reserved.
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