T - AT&T Inc.
30.45 +0.37 (1.23%)
Before hours: 4:58AM EDT
| Previous Close | 29.90 |
| Open | 30.11 |
| Bid | 30.60 x 2900 |
| Ask | 30.65 x 1100 |
| Day's Range | 30.02 - 30.50 |
| 52 Week Range | 26.08 - 39.70 |
| Volume | 37,724,979 |
| Avg. Volume | 38,379,311 |
| Market Cap | 214.32B |
| Beta (5Y Monthly) | 0.68 |
| PE Ratio (TTM) | 15.28 |
| EPS (TTM) | 1.97 |
| Earnings Date | Jul. 23, 2020 |
| Forward Dividend & Yield | 2.08 (6.91%) |
| Ex-Dividend Date | Jul. 09, 2020 |
| 1y Target Est | 33.64 |
- Motley Fool
Another AT&T Streaming Service May Be Doomed
AT&T (NYSE: T) is very much involved in streaming video. There's HBO Now, the direct-to-consumer counterpart to HBO -- both are distinct from streaming app HBO Go, which is available to HBO TV subscribers. The company also offers HBO Max, a new premium streaming service.
- Motley Fool
5 Top Stocks to Secure Your Financial Independence
On this day, 244 years ago, all but one of the 13 United Colonies officially adopted the Declaration of Independence, thus declaring their collective right to govern without England calling the shots. If you have spare cash that won't be needed to pay bills or cover emergencies, then the following blend of growth and income stocks should be perfect to help you secure your financial freedom. The first top stock that'll put you on the path toward financial independence is e-commerce giant Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN).
- Motley Fool
Did AT&T Just Scuttle DirecTV With Another Price Hike?
Higher monthly bills only impact new customers, but new customers were DirecTV's best hope for a revival.
- Motley Fool
5 High-Yield Dividend Stocks to Watch
One of the places they've found cash returns is in dividend stocks, particularly those that offer a relatively high payout. Fortunately, some high-yield dividend stocks remain well-positioned to sustain their dividends. AbbVie (NYSE: ABBV) spent most of its history as a subsidiary of Abbott Laboratories before becoming an independent company in 2013.
- Motley Fool
Why Spotify Technology Stock Skyrocketed 42.7% in June
Shares of Spotify (NYSE: SPOT) gained 42.7% in June, according to data from S&P Global Market Intelligence. Spotify stock posted big gains in the middle of last month after the company announced a string of new podcast deals and received favorable ratings coverage from analysts.
- Motley Fool
3 High-Yield Dividend Stocks to Buy for the Second Half of 2020
Buying dividend stocks comes with a number of advantages. Additionally, dividend income can help to partly hedge the inevitable stock market corrections that crop up from time to time. Dividends can also be reinvested via a dividend reinvestment plan (DRIP) to compound your wealth.
- Reuters
CORRECTED-NBCU's Peacock strikes deal with ViacomCBS to stream 'The Godfather' and others
Comcast Corp's NBCUniversal has struck a deal with ViacomCBS Inc to bring "The Godfather" trilogy, "Undercover Boss" and other hit franchises to the upcoming Peacock streaming video platform, the companies announced on Wednesday. Peacock, set to launch nationally on July 15 on mobile devices, Web and connected television platforms, will compete against Netflix Inc, Amazon.com Inc Prime Video, Walt Disney Co's Disney+, Hulu, and AT&T Inc's HBO Max in the fight for paying subscribers.
- Motley Fool
Virtual MVPDs Are Suffering the Same Fate as Traditional Cable
Google's YouTube TV is raising its monthly rate from $50 to $65. The company cited those additional channels, its deal with AT&T (NYSE: T) to offer subscribers HBO Max, as well as some new features in its price increase announcement. YouTube TV had been the lowest-priced virtual multichannel video programming distributor (vMVPD) that offered a full-fledged cable subscription replacement.
- Yahoo Finance Video
Google’s YouTube TV raises prices
Yahoo Finance’s Heidi Chung breaks down the latest on the streaming wars and Google's recent news that it would raise prices for its TV services to $64 from $50 dollars a month.
ReutersUS antitrust agencies release guidelines for vertical deals
The U.S. Justice Department and Federal Trade Commission, which investigate proposed mergers to ensure they are legal, issued guidelines on Tuesday codifying current practice in their probes of so-called vertical mergers, which combine a company and a supplier. The new guidelines "explain our investigative practices as we apply them today and have applied them in recent years," said Makan Delrahim, chief of the Justice Department's antitrust division. A rare example of a vertical deal that the government sought to stop was telecommunications company AT&T's purchase of movie and TV show maker Time Warner.
- Zacks
AT&T Launches 5G in 28 More Markets Using DSS Technology
Currently, consumers in Miami, Jackson, Austin and Salt Lake City have access to AT&T's (T) 5G network.
- Motley Fool
Thinking of Buying AT&T Stock? Here's What You Need to Know
Its high yield may make this dividend stock interesting to income investors, but the telecom giant has some troubles it will need to overcome.
- Yahoo Finance Video
Fed kicking off primary market corporate credit facility
On Monday, the Federal Reserve made the decision to officially open the doors to the primary market corporate credit facility. Yahoo Finance's Brian Cheung joins The Ticker to discuss.
- Reuters
U.S. senators urge funding for internet access during pandemic
Democratic U.S. senators on Monday were to introduce legislation to ensure Americans who have suffered economic hardships due to the coronavirus pandemic have access to broadband internet. The bill, which was seen by Reuters and will be made public later on Monday, would provide free or low-cost broadband service to low-income families or those who have been recently laid off or furloughed due to the COVID-19 pandemic. It would boost an existing Federal Communications Commission Lifeline subsidy program to help millions more low-income Americans qualify, with more than 20 million Americans out of work.
- Bloomberg
Some Harry Potter Game Developers Rattled by J.K. Rowling Backlash
(Bloomberg) -- One of the most anticipated video games is one whose existence has yet to be acknowledged by its publisher, Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment. It’s a big-budget Harry Potter game that will let players role-play as wizards and roam a vast, open-world re-creation of Hogwarts and its surrounding areas.The long-rumored project is very real, according to two people currently working on it. The game is in development at a Warner Bros.-owned studio, Avalanche Software in Salt Lake City, Utah, and is scheduled for release late next year for platforms including the upcoming Sony Corp. PlayStation 5 and Microsoft Corp. Xbox Series X, said the people, who requested anonymity over fears they would be fired for speaking publicly about an unannounced game.Harry Potter is among the highest-profile projects within Warner Bros. Interactive, along with a Batman game that is in the works. Footage from a very early version of the untitled game began circulating in 2018. That video was authentic, but most of the rumors that have come out since are not, said one of the people working on it. Despite a series of challenges—a global pandemic, a fierce backlash against the franchise’s creator, a possible sale of the Warner Bros. video game publishing business—the game remains on track for next year, the person said.Within the team, though, some anxiety surrounds the work. The studio’s management has not addressed recent comments from the author J.K. Rowling that were widely viewed as transphobic, the people said. The situation made some members of the team uncomfortable and sparked private discussions among staff over the pandemic water cooler, the workplace communication app Slack.Spokespeople for AT&T Inc.’s Warner Bros. Interactive and Rowling declined to comment.Rowling, 54, is a near-inextricable part of the wizardry franchise she conjured more than two decades ago. She continues to play a role in most projects associated with the Harry Potter brand, and the game is no exception. However, one of the people working on the game stressed that Rowling has very little direct involvement.Rowling has courted controversy on Twitter in the past, but this month, she made her most inflammatory comments yet. On June 6, Rowling tweeted criticism of an article that used the phrase “people who menstruate” to differentiate between those who were born women and those who transitioned. Later, the author expanded on her thoughts in an essay on her website, writing that “the ‘inclusive’ language that calls female people ‘menstruators’ and ‘people with vulvas’ strikes many women as dehumanising and demeaning.”The result was that many transgender people felt demeaned, and the comments were denounced by fans and collaborators. Cast members from the Harry Potter series, including Daniel Radcliffe and Emma Watson, said they disagreed with Rowling’s stance, and Warner Bros. responded by touting its “inclusive culture.”Many fans are attempting to reconcile their love of the fantasy series with its author’s beliefs, which they find repugnant. On Reddit, there’s a 6,000-member community dedicated to the yet-to-be-announced Harry Potter game. The usual exchange of rumors and wish lists that takes place there was derailed this month by debate over Rowling’s statements. The forum’s editors posted a declaration that they “firmly stand in disagreement with the opinions stated in those tweets” and that fans should avoid discussing them.The Rowling controversy is likely to diminish some anticipation for the game, said Felicia Grady, managing editor of the popular Harry Potter fan site MuggleNet. “Based on what I’ve seen from fans, I do believe that Rowling’s comments have had some effect on the level of excitement they have for the Harry Potter RPG or other upcoming content,” Grady wrote in an email. “We’ve seen comments from fans who no longer wish to support Rowling or the brand financially.”The potential sale of Warner Bros. Interactive would have an even greater impact on the game’s future, said Matthew Kanterman, an analyst at Bloomberg Intelligence. Pricy projects are the most at risk of cancellation in the event of a sale, he said, “especially something like this that has been in the works for years.” CNBC, which reported two weeks ago on talks to sell the AT&T-owned gaming unit, said a deal wasn’t imminent.Warner Bros. had originally planned to announce the Harry Potter game during a news conference at the trade show E3 in June, according to people familiar with the plans. When E3 was canceled due to the coronavirus pandemic, the publisher’s marketing roadmap shifted.The new plan is to unveil the Batman game in August at a digital event called DC FanDome, and the Harry Potter game will be revealed later, a person with knowledge of the plans said. The person said those plans were made before Rowling’s comments.For more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.comSubscribe now to stay ahead with the most trusted business news source.©2020 Bloomberg L.P.
- Bloomberg
Fed Reveals Bond Purchases Including AT&T, UnitedHealth, Walmart
(Bloomberg) -- The Federal Reserve bought bonds issued by companies including AT&T Inc., UnitedHealth Group Inc. and Walmart Inc. as part of its emergency lending program set up in response to the pandemic, according to new disclosures.On June 16, the U.S. central bank began purchasing securities of individual issuers as part of a broad index it created to include companies that were eligible for the program.The disclosures, posted Sunday, showed that of the $207 million of purchases made on the first day of buying, about 21% were of debt issued by firms in the consumer non-cyclical sector, while 15% were of consumer cyclical debt and 10% were of technology debt. Issues rated below investment grade comprised 3.6% of the securities acquired.In a separate disclosure, the New York Fed released the composition of the broad index the central bank is using to conduct the purchases. Fed officials have said the goal of the buying is to maintain liquidity in the market for corporate debt, so that issuers are able to access capital despite the deep economic downturn created by the pandemic. The index is comprised of almost 800 issuers.In mid-May, the Fed began buying exchange-traded funds invested in corporate debt as it readied for outright purchases. As of Tuesday, the Fed had amassed $8.71 billion of assets including ETFs and individual securities through the program, known as the Secondary Market Corporate Credit Facility.On June 17, Fed Chairman Jerome Powell told the House Financial Services Committee that the central bank would reallocate purchases of ETFs toward individual debt securities through the index it created.“Buying cash bonds is going to form the primary mode of support over time by which we support market function,” Powell said during the hearing. “Over time, we will gradually move away from ETFs.”The program is set to expire on Sept. 30.For more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.comSubscribe now to stay ahead with the most trusted business news source.©2020 Bloomberg L.P.
- Yahoo Finance
'Gone with the Wind' returns to HBO Max as Disney revamps Splash Mountain
HBO Max and Disney are stepping up to address racial blind spots following the death of George Floyd.
- Yahoo Finance Video
'Gone with the Wind' returns to HBO Max as Disney revamps famous ride over 'Song of the South' ties
Yahoo Finance's Alexandra Canal breaks down how big-name entertainment companies are continuing to respond to racist claims following the death of George Floyd.
- Business Wire
AT&T Declares Quarterly Dividend on Preferred Shares
The board of directors of AT&T Inc. (NYSE: T) today declared quarterly dividends on the company’s 5.000% Perpetual Preferred Stock, Series A and the company’s 4.750% Perpetual Preferred Stock, Series C. The Series A dividend is $312.50 per preferred share, or $0.3125 per depositary share. The Series C dividend is $296.875 per preferred share, or $0.296875 per depositary share. The dividends are payable on August 3, 2020, to stockholders of record at the close of business on July 10, 2020.
- Business Wire
AT&T Declares Quarterly Dividend
The board of directors of AT&T Inc. (NYSE: T) today declared a quarterly dividend of $0.52 a share on the company’s common shares. The dividend is payable on August 3, 2020, to stockholders of record at the close of business on July 10, 2020.
- Zacks
Top Stock Reports for Alphabet, AT&T & Philip Morris
Top Stock Reports for Alphabet, AT&T; & Philip Morris
- Bloomberg
How to Go Cold Turkey on $77 Billion of Facebook Ads
(Bloomberg Opinion) -- It’s good that big brands like Verizon Communications Inc. and Unilever NV are pulling ads from Facebook Inc.As my colleague Sarah Halzack has written, the way to make the adtech giant change its approach to tackling hate speech and misinformation is to target how it makes money. (A similar effort worked at Google’s YouTube unit.) But Mark Zuckerberg and co. will still make $77 billion this year from advertisers. If brands really believe in this crusade, they should get off Facebook entirely.On Thursday, Verizon became one of the biggest brands to announce it will pull ads from Facebook in July, joining the likes of Patagonia Inc. and Recreational Equipment Inc. in a month-long campaign called Stop Hate For Profit. The movement is being led by groups such as the Anti-Defamation League and Color of Change, and is channeling momentum of the Black Lives Matter movement to realize real change. On Friday, Ben & Jerry’s, Hellman’s and Dove parent Unilever announced it would halt ads on Facebook and Twitter Inc. in the U.S. for the rest of 2020.It’s a commendable effort to force Facebook to remodel its practices, but there’s a business incentive too: An ad appearing alongside a conspiracy theory is not a good look, particularly if a slice of the revenue goes to the maker of the video. A group of brands with a combined advertising budget of $97 billion is already pushing for better controls. More of them should follow Verizon’s lead, not least the handful of other telecoms operators in the U.S.Arguably, the main reason Verizon even needs to advertise on Facebook is because its rivals AT&T Inc. and T-Mobile U.S. Inc. are both doing so too. Since competitive intensity has been significantly reduced by pandemic lockdowns, now seems a particularly good time for mobile operators to cut marketing spend.If firms are serious about upping the pressure on Zuckerberg, however, they should abandon their presence on the social network completely by deleting their Facebook pages. That might seem like a brand cutting off its nose to spite its face, but as long as it has a Facebook page, then the advertising boycott looks like an empty threat.That’s because the ad spend will ultimately return after the boycott. There’s little point in maintaining a corporate Facebook presence without paying to promote content, due to the limitations of what’s known as organic reach, or how many users see a post without a company or individual paying to get it in front of them. Without paid promotion, just 1% of a page’s followers are likely to see a given post, according to digital agency Jellyfish. It wasn’t always this way. In the early days, Facebook lured brands by showing how many customers they could reach by setting up a page. Then the Menlo Park, California-based firm changed its algorithm so that very few people would see a company’s posts if it didn’t pay for promotion. It was the classic Silicon Valley bait-and-switch. UniCredit SpA, Italy’s biggest bank, bit the bullet and ditched its Facebook presence a year ago. It had already stopped paying for Facebook ads, which meant that very few of the 546,000 followers of its UniCredit Italia page actually saw its content — perhaps just 5,500. Its resolve is so far holding: It hasn’t returned to the social network yet.Being on Facebook can also present more of a risk than an opportunity, especially for an incumbent brand like a bank or telecoms giant. UniCredit’s followers probably represented a significant cross-section of its consumer banking customers, which therefore served as a handy list of people for challenger banks like N26 or Revolut to target with ads and try to steal away. Plus, if a company has a Facebook page, it still has to regularly post new content and interact with customers — both of which cost money. If it doesn’t, the page will likely fill up with customer complaints, which would show up at the top of online search results. The business reasons for big-spending incumbents to leave Facebook might be almost as good as the ethical ones.Zuckerberg needs financial incentives to be more proactive about managing content effectively, partially because his lodestar has long been user engagement. And more polarizing content drives more user engagement. The Wall Street Journal reported in May that a report commissioned by Facebook in 2018 found the platform often did aggravate polarization and tribal behavior, yet the firm decided not to tackle the issue.Regulating content directly often means impinging on thorny free speech issues. It’s a troublesome affair. Far better to find market-based, commercial incentives that mean the issue must be taken seriously. Will enough brands use these to make a meaningful difference? Probably not, but they have the opportunity to give Facebook the firmer poke it needs.This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.Alex Webb is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering Europe's technology, media and communications industries. He previously covered Apple and other technology companies for Bloomberg News in San Francisco.For more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com/opinionSubscribe now to stay ahead with the most trusted business news source.©2020 Bloomberg L.P.
- Business Wire
AT&T Inc. Announces Additional Early Repayment of Debt
AT&T Inc. (NYSE: T) continues to proactively manage its capital structure and reduce upcoming maturity towers.
- Bloomberg
SoftBank's Son Hawks a Hot Stock for Cool Cash
(Bloomberg Opinion) -- As Japan’s SoftBank Group Corp. unloads about 200 million shares of T-Mobile US Inc., more investors get a chance to own a top-performing stock that had been hogged by insiders. SoftBank’s fire sale isn’t a knock on T-Mobile, but rather a reluctant move by billionaire Masayoshi Son to shore up his own troubled conglomerate. Indeed, his loss will be someone else’s gain. Son took control of Sprint Corp. in 2013 and then spent years pursuing a merger between the beleaguered wireless carrier and its stronger rival, T-Mobile. He finally got his way thanks to the Trump administration’s lax regulators at the Justice Department and Federal Communications Commission. Their focus on America’s standing in the so-called race to 5G, the next generation of wireless connectivity, overshadowed the antitrust concerns. Sprint officially became part of T-Mobile in April, handing SoftBank ownership of about 25% of the combined company; another 44% is owned by Deutsche Telekom AG. Until this week, that left only a small public float for a stock that’s long been the envy of its industry — and will likely continue to be.After the implosion of office-space rental company WeWork Cos. and the Covid-19 pandemic, SoftBank suffered record losses from its investments and is in need of cash. In turn, the company is undertaking a series of complex transactions to exit most of its T-Mobile stake, generating about $20 billion in proceeds. The deal involves a public equity offering, a rights offering to existing shareholders, a private trust vehicle and a call option for Deutsche Telekom to increase its ownership of T-Mobile down the road when its own balance sheet is in better shape. The transactions are structured so that even though more T-Mobile shares will be available to the public, the total number of shares outstanding won’t change. T-Mobile also gets $300 million for playing banker. T-Mobile’s stock price closed at an all-time high of $107.16 on Tuesday. After the market closed, the shares SoftBank is selling priced at $103 apiece, according to a CNBC report.T-Mobile’s subscriber base, revenue and stock price are all expected to continue growing for the foreseeable future at a faster clip than that of its two larger rivals, Verizon Communications Inc. and AT&T Inc. Its consumer appeal comes from offering cheaper data plans on a network that has improved tremendously over the years, as well as a friendlier customer-service experience. Led by a larger-than-life CEO whose magenta wardrobe made him a walking T-Mobile billboard, the company was able to distinguish itself over time as a fun brand in an otherwise drab industry. That CEO, John Legere, left after sealing the Sprint deal and was replaced by Mike Sievert. The SoftBank share sale is also a farewell performance for Braxton Carter, T-Mobile’s pink cowboy hat-wearing chief financial officer, who retires next week. The Sprint merger fundamentally changed the industry by eliminating a low-cost rival that T-Mobile competed with most. T-Mobile’s own porting ratios, a measure of how many customers one carrier steals from another, showed that it was consistently taking a bigger bite out of Sprint’s subscriber base than either Verizon or AT&T’s. Now that the deal is done, T-Mobile would seem to have two options: 1) Given that there’s so much extra capacity on its network to handle more subscribers, it could cut prices even more. That would supercharge its own growth while putting pressure on AT&T and Verizon. 2) Instead, T-Mobile could keep prices flat or even raise them to improve profit margins more immediately, leaving competition more stagnant. The latter option is the less innovative, less consumer-friendly route that was feared by opponents of the Sprint takeover. (T-Mobile’s 13-hour outage on its network last week also doesn’t help to quell the fear that the industry is insufficiently regulated.) Here’s how different T-Mobile’s profitability might look if it were to adopt AT&T’s pricing:In either case, it may be a win-win for investors. T-Mobile executives predict that it will save more than $40 billion in costs due to the Sprint deal, much of which will come from job cuts and shutting stores in overlapping locations (another reason the transaction was criticized). Wireless carriers also rely on costly ad campaigns to promote their networks. The combined T-Mobile-Sprint will now be able to save about $700 million a year just from lower advertising expenses, according to a report earlier this month by Jonathan Chaplin, an analyst for New Street Research.Chaplin expects T-Mobile to pursue the less aggressive avenue of growth, but even then he sees its stock price doubling over the next three to five years. Analysts are generally less optimistic about AT&T and Verizon, as one undergoes a difficult transformation into a communications and entertainment colossus, while the other remains almost singularly focused on 5G with a less-than-ideal set of wireless spectrum. After buying Sprint, T-Mobile’s future looks to be either grow fast or grow faster. Still, this week’s news shows that for a merger pumped up on American 5G zeal and patriotism, the biggest beneficiary just might be a Japanese billionaire short on cash.(Adds pricing information in the fourth paragraph.)This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.Tara Lachapelle is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering the business of entertainment and telecommunications, as well as broader deals. She previously wrote an M&A column for Bloomberg News.For more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com/opinionSubscribe now to stay ahead with the most trusted business news source.©2020 Bloomberg L.P.
- Business Wire
AT&T to Release Second-Quarter 2020 Earnings on July 23, 2020
AT&T Inc.* (NYSE:T) announced today that the company’s second-quarter 2020 results will be released before 7 a.m. ET on Thursday, July 23, 2020. At 8:30 a.m. ET the same day, AT&T will host a conference call to discuss the results. The company’s earnings release, Investor Briefing and related materials will be available at AT&T Investor Relations.
