For the Dividend Dukes of Telecom, Cash Is King

But there's no doubt that the Qwest deal changed CenturyLink's business in a very real and fundamental sense. Comparing the combined company's $4.4 billion quarterly revenues to the pre-merger $1.8 billion from a year ago is a useless exercise. It's more instructive to look at income and cash flows after considering all the costs of running two large telecom networks. Excluding that A&D adjustment, net income was down only 1.5% to $262 million. More importantly, the hard-to-manipulate free cash flows more than tripled thanks to Qwest, landing at $950 million.... Read more