AT&T Results Turn Sour: IPTV and Wireless Fade

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By Douglas A. McIntyre Published
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AT&T (NYSE: T) is running out of new wireless customers to convert. It added only 1.9 million wireless subscribers in the last quarter to push its total to 87 million. The explosive growth in Apple, Inc. (NASDAQ: AAPL) iPhone sales certainly did not show up in AT&T’s results.

For the quarter ended March 31, 2010, AT&T’s consolidated revenues totaled $30.6 billion, up 0.3% compared to the same period last year.

First-quarter 2010 net income attributable to AT&T totaled $2.5 billion, or $0.42 per diluted share, reflecting a previously disclosed noncash charge of $995 million, or $0.17 per diluted share, related to recently enacted changes in the tax treatment for the Medicare Part D subsidy. Excluding this charge, first-quarter earnings would have been $3.5 billion, or $0.59 per diluted share. These results compare with net income of $3.1 billion, or $0.53 per diluted share, in the year-earlier first quarter.

The one bright spot in the wireless results for the company was that “wireless data revenues — from messaging, Internet access, access to applications and related services — increased $947 million–29.8%

AT&T’s wireless business also proved to be a disappointment, AT&T U-verse TV subscribers increased by 231,000 in the quarter to reach 2.3 million, an extremely weak sum give the company’s aspirations to replace cable in American homes.

The firm’s “consumer voice” business, the core of its wireline operation, fell again. Revenue was off 12% from last year to $7.5 billion. The billion difference with the same quarter last year is almost impossible to replace with other lines of business, or at least that is what AT&T’s results show.

Douglas A. McIntyre

Photo of Douglas A. McIntyre
About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.

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