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NEW YORK (AP) - Sprint Nextel Corp., the third-largest wireless carrier in the U.S., reports its fourth-quarter results before the stock market opens Wednesday.

WHAT TO WATCH FOR: After losing millions of subscribers to other carriers in the last few years, analysts believe Sprint stemmed, or possibly even reversed, that trend in the fourth quarter.

Craig Moffett at Sanford Bernstein believes that Sprint will report adding a net 327,000 customers. Brett Feldman at Deutsche Bank believes it will report losing 150,000 - a lot less than in recent quarters.

The expected improvement stems from price cuts for contract-signing customers and continued success in attracting prepaying customers to Boost Mobile.

But analysts don't expect Sprint's troubles to end with improving subscriber numbers. Its margins are suffering because it heavily subsidizes attractive handsets to compete with market leaders AT&T Inc. and Verizon Wireless, and because of price cuts.

Moffett downgraded Sprint to "Underperform" in January, saying it will have a tough time competing at the high end for contract customers and at the low end for prepaying customers. Most customers rate Sprint at "Hold."

WHY IT MATTERS: Sprint has 48.3 million wireless subscribers, and its struggle to keep them affects pricing on other carriers. Sprint also owns most of Clearwire Corp., which is building a nationwide wireless broadband network. Sprint's funding of that project is crucial to its continuation, though Clearwire has been getting some funding from cable companies as well as from Google Inc. and Intel Corp.

WHAT'S EXPECTED: Analysts polled by Thomson Reuters expect Sprint to report a loss of 19 cents per share in the fourth quarter on sales of $8.0 billion.

LAST YEAR'S QUARTER: Sprint reported a loss of 57 cents per share on revenue of $8.4 billion.