Piper Jaffray Reiterates Overweight, $5 Target on Sprint Nextel

Piper Jaffray maintains its Overweight rating and $5 target price on Sprint Nextel

ahead of the company releasing its 4Q11 results. Piper Jaffray says, "At a recent investor conference, Sprint CEO Dan Hesse spoke openly about the company's strive to improve churn. The good news is that voluntary churn - customers who actively choose to leave Sprint - continues to improve. The bad news is that involuntary churn is at an elevated level. Management indicated that involuntary churn was affected earlier in the year by changes in the indirect retail channel. Going ahead, churn will also be negatively impacted as customers are moved off the iDEN network. Because of this, we are pushing out our forecast for improved churn and increasing churn to 1.95% in 4Q, up from 1.86%." S closed at $2.46 a share on Monday.