https://www.barrons.com/articles/at-t-spent-a-decade-buying-things-now-its-cleaning-house-51644025561
9 replies (most recent on top)
they need to clean house at the top.
why do the people who made terrible decisions for the last 10 to 15 years get to keep making the choices.
Reminds me of an episode of Hoarders. Lady fills her house with all kinds of "good deal" sales items, clear to the ceiling in all tooms. Rats and roaches infest the hoard, crapping and urinating on the hoard. Nothing in the house can be salvaged, everything is trash. Stankey and Stephenson have flushed $100B of value from AT&T. Can't understand why they aren't behind bars for fraud.
Clearly Stankey brought in Kilar to be "his guy" and got rid of veteran Warner/HBO executives who actually made the studio profitable. Kilar will be unloaded soon, he is way out his league and overpaid.
It all comes down to Att CEO/BOD arrogance! They literally thought/think they are smarter than everyone. They were warned about their pipe dreams of media world dominance and ignored Warner Brothers input. They kept their big "plans" secret supposedly bc OLD Hollywood wouldn't get it! Jason Kilar was the absolute worst possible hire, and cost Att $52M for his salary alone. Hollywood couldn't script a more disastrous business model. Oh, and executed the top brass at WB during Cvd. What Mo--ns! Too add insult to injury, all the fools who made these decisions, are still at Att! How is this possible?
Expect a lot of headcount reduction, minimal raises and not much else.
If you’re a kook-aid drinker, then make this your home until you are canned. Everyone else, the writing is on the wall.
Anyone remember AOL Time Warner?? "Clash of cultures set the stage for a spectacular corporate collapse", guessing Randy and Stankey didn't read that book.
Stankey was Stephenson’s enabler and proponent of this mess. Now he’s reversing it at a loss. Meanwhile the former CEO pocketed over $200 million plus perks!’
Funny, under new CEO Stankey.... ha ha ha... Stankey was the CHIEF strategist under the former CEO who made all the stupid strategic merger and attempted acquisition sc--w ups... Mega sc--w ups! Multi Billion dollar sc--w ups.... Biggest sc--w ups in corporate America. Wow! WTF is the AT&T Board doing - Nada. Nothing. Clueless. T stock will be below $20 again.
AT&T cast light on its pending spinoff of WarnerMedia to Discovery this past week—a big step toward putting a decade of misguided mergers and acquisitions behind it. AT&T spent years dishing out billions of dollars on deals, including $66 billion for DirecTV in 2015 and $106 billion for Time Warner in 2018. These brought the 145-year-old phone company into new, more-cyclical industries, and at one point made it the most indebted company in the U.S.
Under new CEO John Stankey, AT&T has slimmed down. AT&T spun off DirecTV and other pay-TV assets, and sold its Xandr advertising platform to Microsoft . With WarnerMedia gone in the second quarter, management can focus on 5G wireless and fiberoptic broadband: high fixed-cost businesses with attractive economies of scale and recurring subscription revenue.
Shedding its conglomerate structure won’t make challenges evaporate for AT&T. Competition is growing, especially as subscriber growth slows after a pandemic boost. AT&T must spend to grow its 5G C-band network to 200 million Americans by the end of 2023, and reach 30 million homes and businesses with its fiber network by the end of 2025.
Post–WarnerMedia, AT&T will have $20 billion of annual free cash flow. According to management, 40% of that, or $8 billion, will go toward a smaller dividend (for more on AT&T’s new dividend, see this week’s Income Investing column). This year, it can spend $24 billion on capital investments. And some of the $43 billion from the WarnerMedia transaction will go to pay down debt. That won’t leave a lot for big-time M&A.