I had a little discussion with colleagues about it and I'm interested in what others think are the biggest reasons for instability here.
19 replies (most recent on top)
spending money faster than they can earn it
John Stankey should be fired. He does not even understand what AT&T is about. We are not Amazon. We are aggregation of RBOCs and Cingular and DirecTV and ... Fire John Stankey.
Failed mergers & spending more $$ to patch copper than to replace with fiber.
Failure of the T-mobile merger with the break up fee improving T-mobile’s competitiveness. The subsequent acquisitions derived from that failure too.
I'd say that these are the reasons for the nearly 7 years of instability, in order of descending impact:
- Stink
- BoD
- Stink
- Randy
- Poppin Fresh and the rest of the divisional leaders
- Stink
- Stink
- Stink
- Stink
- Stink sycophants
Employee lifers who lost relevant skIlls 5-10 years in and regularly ended up being a corporate cost liability.
Stanley trying to play Rico Hollywood
AT&T had a chance to buy Netflix in the early days but passed on it. Not kidding! OOOPPPPS!!!
Netflix dodged a bullet! As a long time Netflix stockholder, thank goodness.
When everyone started to realize you were just a grain of dirt to upper management and you really didn’t matter
AT&T had a chance to buy Netflix in the early days but passed on it. Not kidding! OOOPPPPS!!!
@gcy+1mUnepLv - GREAT analysis. I too sensed this jealousy about trying to pivot Ma Bell into a software-driven, nimble tech startup- something that it just... well, isn't. The tech companies are not infrastructure-heavy giants that take a longgg time to change course. Maybe someone on a board made fun of Randall in the clubhouse, or he got jealous of some perks offered at a Silicon Valley corporation. We may never now.
Ultimately the company pulled the rudder so hard to port that it broke off.
I continue to blame the decline on the Identity Crisis we had starting in the 2010s that may have started with Net Neutrality wars. There also seemed to be some serious C-Suite jealousy of Tech Companies or companies like Netflix and boredom around building out fiber. Once they entertained the notion of being an entertainment company with the acquisition of DTV(and then TW) and a "software company" - thank you Donovan, who by the way brought in several VP+ folks to transform the business who brought in their friends. As far as I know, they are all gone now. I mention that because there was some significant empire building that resulted and most of it was pure overhead and it ultimately amounted to no transformations - just ridiculous amounts of money spent.
When those things were in focus, things like fiber build and wireless (maybe to a lesser extent) took a back seat even though we had significant broadband commitments as part of the DTV merger deal. Those business units and the orgs that supported those systems were starved and put on life support. Of course, now they have spent 100s of millions trying to revive them, and while I'm no longer there - I'm hearing that's not going well.
Of course, those things all impacted the debt, FCF declining, ect
Horrible Culture, Inability to identify value added talent, and short term mentality. Stankey has lost 95% of the employee base, lost Wall Street, lost customers, lost all the mom and pop investors out there. ATT leadership has zero self awareness at where they stand and the hubris is still there. This latest move will create a new wave of slackers who just don't care anymore about there employer. Why should they when Stankey moves have cost shareholders of ATT over $100B easily.
Nice try stank
130 Billion in debt from a company with an endless history of failed acquisitions. Time after time they spent billions and failed miserably only reverse course a few short months later. Look at the stock price 15.82. You could say it was this low in 1993 but in 1993 15.82 would be worth 30 today, so it’s far worse than that. Everyone always held ATT because of its dividend and even though Stankey said we could pay it, he cut it in half. There goes the incentive to hold ATT. All because we had to make payments on debt of failed acquisitions. Last year Wall Street readjusted ATT’s projections for free cash flow 1Q 23 DOWN to 3 Billion. We only had 1 Billion!
What does coming up 66% short tell everyone? They have no idea what they’re doing. You can’t come up that radically short and expect confidence from investors. So here we are a sinking ship. Not many people are capable of taking a monopoly and destroying it, but hats off to leadership.
AT&T annual free cash flow for 2022 was $16.186B, a 25.15% decline from 2021.
AT&T annual free cash flow for 2021 was $21.625B, a 5.13% decline from 2020.
AT&T annual free cash flow for 2020 was $22.794B, a 21.49% decline from 2019.
Debt, too many outstanding shares compared to our competitors, too many employees, automation, transition to fiber from copper- requires less maintenance, poor leadership decisions.
All of these items put us where we are right now.
Bad investments and leadership!
Way too much debt from bad investments.
Too many employees which has driven a culture of complacency with no innovation. There are some exceptions.