Lumen (LUMN 0.54%) stock closed out this week's trading with big gains. The company's share price surged 7.8% higher compared to where it stood at market close on Friday of the previous week.
Lumen's valuation gained ground this week in response to news that the telecommunications company had signed a new deal with the broadcasting division of the Pac-12 college sports conference. The gains over the last week helped the telecom specialist cut its stock slide across 2025's trading to 6.4%.
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Lumen stock rose in response to the Pac-12 deal
On Wednesday, Lumen announced it had won a new contract with Pac-12 Enterprises -- the broadcasting arm of the Pac-12 college athletics conference. Lumen will be providing its new partner with network-as-a-service (NaaS) technologies used to stream the conference's games. While Lumen stock is trading down roughly 52% from its high over the last three years, the company has seen some explosive periods of gains, thanks to wins in the artificial intelligence (AI) and NaaS spaces.
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What's next for Lumen?
Lumen stock enjoyed a huge rally in 2024 after it was announced that the company had scored contracts with Meta Platforms and Microsoft to provide Private Connectivity Fabric (PCF) technologies to support AI infrastructure.
While the second-quarter report the company published at the beginning of August arrived with weaker-than-expected sales and earnings and spurred a big sell-off, the company actually raised its full-year free-cash-flow (FCF) target to between $1.2 billion and $1.4 billion -- up from previous guidance for FCF between $700 million and $900 million. Some of the FCF target increase appears to be driven by earlier-than-expected execution on a previously signed $8.5 billion PCF deal. But the fact that the deal is being realized on an accelerated timeline seems to be a positive indicator.
