Premium ContentMouse over Home then click on Premium Content for information.Fourth-quarter revenues and net income for CenturyLink Communications fell as customers continued to shed their landline telephone service, the company said Wednesday.
For the fourth quarter, net income for the Monroe, La.-based rural telecommunications provider was $109 million, or 18 cents per share, versus $225 million and 74 cents per share a year ago.
The company said that without charges tied to employee benefit plans and other one-time fees, earnings per share would have been 58 cents.
The decline was a result, company officials said, of CenturyLink's customers canceling their landline telephone service, a trend that has CenturyLink and other phone operators hustling to bolster their broadband internet service and other technology-based offerings.
During the quarter, CenturyLink said it added 70,000 high-speed internet customers, said Glen F. Post, III, the company's chief executive officer and president.
Revenue for the 2011 fourth quarter was $4.65 billion, a decline from $4.8 billion last year. Both of those figures are adjusted to include revenue from Qwest Communications and from Savvis, the data center operator that CenturyLink acquired in the last year.
The company's biggest sources of revenue were nearly evenly split between legacy products and landline telephone service, which accounted for $2.1 billion in revenue, and "strategic services" like broadband and internet-based television service that had $2.03 billion in revenues during the quarter.
For the full year, revenue was $15.4 billion compared to $7 billion in 2010. The year-ago figure doesn't include Qwest and Savvis revenues.
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