On Nov 26, 2015, Zacks Investment Research upgraded leading communications and technology solutions provider in the U.S – Windstream Holdings Inc. WIN – by a notch to a Zacks Rank #2 (Buy).
Windstream reported better-than-expected financial results in the third quarter of 2015. Loss incurred in the quarter was narrower than expected while revenues beat the Zacks Consensus Estimate.
Windstream’s focus on improving sales and its cost-cutting and planned pricing initiatives are expected to drive revenues and margins, going forward. Investments made in data center and fiber expansion will create further impetus for revenue growth in the coming quarters. The company has also revealed its plan to expand its Carrier Switched Ethernet services across the U.S. Windstream is expected to register high profits in the coming quarters on the back of strong domestic presence, strategic growth across segments and a capital efficient business model.
Recently, Windstream achieved another milestone by accomplishing substantial service upgrade in roughly 600 markets across 12 states. With this, the company aims to deploy quicker Internet speeds of up to 100 megabits-per-second (Mbps) for residential and small business customers. Notably, the upgrades follow Windstream's Sep 2015 announcement of faster speed accessibility in 250 initial markets. Together, almost one million households and small businesses have access to high data speeds of up to 100 Mbps.
The company has launched new cloud-to-cloud disaster recovery management solutions which will replicate mission-critical virtual servers and data to provide an alternative system for cloud-based disaster recovery to the customers. The solutions will also secure customer applications by replicating data from their private clouds into a cloud in Windstream’s cloud data centre. Moreover, according to an estimate by research firm Gartner, the present size of the Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) market is approximately $1.3 billion, with a related compound annual growth rate of about 30%.
The dynamics of the communication industry is significantly governed by technology innovation. Accordingly, leading national carriers have aggressively continued to introduce new networking technologies and next-generation product and service offerings. Top-tier carriers such as AT&T Inc. T, Verizon Communications Inc. VZ and Sprint Corp. S have deployed 3G networks across their coverage markets, besides investing heavily for the rollout of 4G technologies such as Long-Term Evolution (LTE) and WiMax. Increased availability of these new technologies may result in greater competition for Windstream’s broadband Internet business.
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