UK telecoms incumbent BT says it has slowed its sales decline on the back of rising demand for superfast broadband services.

The operator has reported revenues of £4.79 billion ($7.36 billion) for the fourth quarter of 2012, a fall of just 2% since the same period a year earlier.

The figure was boosted by a relatively strong performance at BT Retail amid continuing declines at the operator’s wholesale and IT divisions.

Even so, net profit slid by 6.3% to £591 million.

German telecoms incumbent Deutsche Telekom has heralded signs of a turnaround in its US fortunes, and continued improvements in its domestic market, with net profit up 3.5%, to €564 million ($741 million), for the first three months of the year.

The bottom-line figure was boosted by a fall in depreciation and amortization costs in the USA.

Spain’s Telefonica has reported a 20.6% increase in net income for the first three months of the year, to €902 million ($1.19 billion), but says revenues dropped by 8.8%, to €14.14 billion, largely because of unfavorable exchange-rate movements.

Net profit surged because Telefonica (Madrid, Spain) had reported losses from associates in the prior-year quarter, and the Group’s operating income fell by 17.7%, to €2.07 billion.

Wireless service provider Clearwire Corp said on Monday its proposed buyout by majority owner Sprint Nextel Corp was the best option for Clearwire's minority stockholders.

Clearwire (Bellevue, WA, USA) shares, which fell about 6 percent in an initial reaction to the statement, recovered to trade just above the closing price of $3.38 on Friday.

Ericsson expects cut-throat competition between telecoms equipment makers as China prepares to spend billions of dollars on high-speed networks, punishing margins at a time when profitability is already under pressure.

A decade-long price war launched by Chinese vendors Huawei (Shenzhen, China) and ZTE (Shenzhen, China) has already forced suppliers like Nortel and Motorola out of the market while smaller players like Alcatel-Lucent (Paris, France) are mired in losses.

Telefonica Deutschland has signed an agreement to use new high-speed broadband services becoming available from Deutsche Telekom.

The two operators already have arrangements in place under which Telefonica Deutschland (Munich, Germany) rents local loops from Deutsche Telekom (Bonn, Germany) to provide broadband services based on legacy ADSL networks.

Under the new deal, the operator – a subsidiary of Spanish telecoms incumbent Telefonica (Madrid, Spain) – will rent capacity on VDSL lines that Deutsche Telekom is modifying through the use of vectoring technology.

Belgian telecoms incumbent Belgacom has blamed a 1.4% dip in net income for the first three months of the year entirely on the impact of adverse regulation.

The operator managed to maintain revenues at about €1.59 billion ($2.08 billion), the same as in the first three months of 2012, but saw net income slip to €171 million, from €199 a year earlier, due to regulatory measures that included cutting the rates operators can charge one another for call termination (so-called mobile termination rates).

London:

Spanish telecoms incumbent Telefonica has agreed to sell a 40% stake in its Central American subsidiaries to Corporacion Multi Inversiones (CMI), a Latin American industrial group, for a fee of $500 million.

The operator is to spin off operations in El Salvador, Guatemala, Nicaragua and Panama and manage them in a separate unit in which it will retain a 60% controlling stake.

Telefonica (Madrid, Spain) is due to receive a further payment of $72 million from CMI depending on the “operational performance of the aforementioned assets in the coming years”.

Qatari telecoms incumbent Ooredoo says net profit for the first quarter of 2013 grew by 13.6%, to QAR808 million ($222 million), compared with the same period in 2012, boosted by a strong performance in both domestic and overseas markets.

The Group’s revenues rose by 5.2%, to QAR8.44 billion, as operations in Qatar, Indonesia and Oman continued to sign up new mobile subscribers.