Alltel announced a 51% increase in profits

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Alltel Corp, which has agreed to be bought by private equity investors, posted a 51 percent rise in quarterly profit on Friday as it added more wireless subscribers than expected.
Skip to next paragraph Alltel, which has about 12 million subscribers, said it added a net 205,000 subscribers in the third quarter.In what could be its last quarterly report as a public company, the biggest U.S. rural mobile service provider said third-quarter profit rose to $282.58 million, or 81 cents a share, from $187.2 million, or 48 cents a share, a year ago.Excluding certain items, earnings per share was 80 cents, beating the average analyst estimate of 73 cents according to Reuters Estimates. Alltel cited lower roaming costs and improvements to its bad debt numbers as well as strong subscriber growth for the better-than-expected profit.

Alltel Chief Financial Officer Sharilyn Gasaway said she expects a fourth-quarter improvement in prepaid, which suffered in the third quarter due to changes to the prepaid service Alltel sells at Wal-Mart Stores Inc.On the postpaid side, she said in an interview that Alltel likely took market share from bigger rival Sprint Nextel , which warned that it lost customers during the quarter.

Alltel, which agreed in May to be bought for about $25 billion, said revenue increased to $2.28 billion from $2.01 billion in the same quarter a year ago. Analysts on average had expected revenue of $2.22 billion. Alltel said it expects its sale to TPG Capital and Goldman Sachs, for $71.50 a share, to close by year end. It said that average revenue per user rose 4 percent from the year-earlier quarter to $55.96, with $6.36 coming from data services such as Web surfing. Its customer cancellation rate, known as churn, was 1.9 percent, up from the 1.67 percent in the second quarter. Roe said that this was a typical seasonal shift. Alltel shares were up 4 cents at $70.75 in morning trade on the New York Stock Exchange
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