Eventually the dividend will take a hit
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the dividend is the only thing keeping the stock alive
I thought that the stock was going to go up to 50 or 60 when Elliot Management bought into it. Now they are cutting costs by laying off non-essential and inefficient personnel. Look at the yield on that dividend. too much debt though. A lot of retail stores are going bankrupt because they had too much debt and did not save for a rainy day.
They will take the dividend until the very end and will be the last to go if then because it is free money for the board.
Luckily I made Fidelity be aggressive with my money to the point they sold most of my stock with T. I only have 100 shares of it. The rest is scattered amongst mutual funds.
Does the OP realize that T increased the amount of the dividend last year ... even with massive debt and declining customers and revenue?
That dividend isn't going anywhere.
We need new customers and lots of them in order to offset losses and continue the dividend. The cost of providing service to all these new customers will be high.
The dividend will not take a hit. That's the one thing that the board, Stinkbomb, and the rest of the top executives hold as sacred. Because it's how they get a lot of extra, free money.
Total executive pay is often less than 25% salary and 75% bonus and stock-based. And while those of us grunts with T in our IRA or 401(k) may have a few hundred or a thousand shares, those at the top have hundreds of thousands or millions of shares. Randy alone has well over 3M shares.
At the last measure, there were over 7 billiion shares of AT&T out there The last dividend payment was just over $2 per share. That means T paid out more than $14 billion in dividends, Over $6M to Randy alone.
Think about that. That is free money.
Do you think the board (all major shareholders) or the executives (who get most of their annual pay from stock dividends) are going to do anything to hurt that? Of course not. If anything the company will go for another huge round of stock buyback to artificially keep the price high.
Meanwhile consider this: if T had reduced the dividend by 50%, to a payout of $1 per share they'd save about $7B right there.
But instead, they're laying workers off.
The dividend is not going anywhere.
Stock owners, the market and the board of directors love surpluses. If it had a negative impact they wouldn't do it every year.