Thursday Market Movers

Sprint Nextel Corporation (NYSE: S): Sprint traded up early on Thursday after reporting earnings that signaled a recovery. The company reported a net loss of $1.4 billion compared to a net loss of $847 million in the same quarter last year. Despite the widened losses, the company reported revenues of $7.3 billion, an 8 percent year-over-year increase. This was the largest year-over-year increase on record for the US wireless industries.

Sprint CEO Dan Hesse stated, “The Sprint platform achieved best ever postpaid ARPU and customer churn that, combined with disciplined customer acquisition and cost management, contributed to our Adjusted OIBDA of $1.45 billion. Based on this performance, we are raising the 2012 Adjusted OIBDA forecast to between $4.5 billion and $4.6 billion.”

Shares of Sprint traded up about 14.5 percent on Thursday.

Western Digital Corp. (NASDAQ: WDC): Shares of Western Digital Corp. traded up on Thursday after reporting earnings that beat analyst expectations on revenue and earnings per share. The company reported a profit of $745 million compared to $158 million in the same period last year. Western Digital Corp reported earnings of $2.87 per share, beating analyst estimates of $2.47 per share.

Chief Executive Officer John Coyne commented, “Fiscal 2012 was one of the most challenging and exciting years in our 42-year history. While responding to two major natural disasters and completing the largest acquisition in the history of the industry, we achieved year-over-year revenue growth of 31 percent and more than doubled earnings per share."

Western Digital Corp. traded up about 24 percent on Thursday.

Akamai Technologies (NASDAQ: AKAM): Akamai Technologies reported earnings on Wednesday after the market close and topped analyst estimates. The company reported revenues of $331 million and earnings of $0.43 per share. Analyst predicted that the company would have revenues of $325.7 million and earnings of $0.37 per share.

President and CEO of Akamai Paul Sagan noted, “Akamai's very strong second quarter results were driven on the top line by increased adoption of our cloud infrastructure solutions as well as continued growth of content delivery solutions.”

Akamai traded up about 21 percent on Thursday.