Thread regarding AT&T layoffs

Changing CEO/CFO might not change much at this point, since they'd all be pressured to follow Elliot Management's gameplan.

Maybe the employees should call for the resignation of the CEO and CFO. After all, the power of social media is great.

Would like to know why upper management hasn’t figured out that are way too many technicians in the Southwest? Techs are doing one job per day taking only 4-5 hours which includes drive time to/from and then idle for 3-4 hours per day. You would think this would be a no brainer in terms of down sizing, but so far nothing...just lucky, perhaps!

@bnp, To a knowledgeable and hands-on CFO, it would be clear from the get-go that the $108 Billion price for TW acquisition cannot be supported by a Return of Investment calculation. Such a high performing CFO would not even let the company engage the investment bankers, thereby saving the company their advisory fee of $80 to $120 million.

CFOs are not meant to be just figureheads to read the companies quarterly earnings report to investors. It is time for the currenct CFO to resign.

@yhn
AT&T had already reduced its workforce by a third between 2010 and 1Q2020. The gravity and extent of the current layoff certainly has to do with the amount of AT&T debt.

For instance, AT&T has reduced employee count by 41,128 between 2018 and 1Q2020. Here is the data based on AT&T quarterly reports.

1Q2018 -4,760
2Q2018 -6,238
3Q2018 -5,340
4Q2018 -1,060
1Q2019 -5,930
2Q2019 -4,500
3Q2019 -5,950
4Q2019 -4,040
1Q2020 -3,310
Total -41,128

You would think that for $30 million a year we could do a lot better than Stankey. In fact, I would expect that for $7.25 an hour we could find someone more competent than Stankey and nowhere near as arrogant.

The debt has nothing to do with current round of Layoffs. The employee reduction plans have been in place for years. Since long before Directv or Time Warner. We were talking about those plans back in 2010, or 2011. The plan at that time was reduce workforce by 1/3 thru automation and workforce effeciences.

OP..Made me sleepy. too long

Their objective is to get paid hefty bonuses regardless of the outcome!! It’s driven by personal greed.

@bnp
Investment Bankers may be worse than lawyers in ripping off organizations as they make money from both sides and laugh all the way to the Bank.

A competent and alert CFO and CEO will know from a ROI calculation that AT&T could not afford to pay $108.7 Billion for Time Warner, and would have stopped the Investment Bankers in their tracks. Yes, the Time Warner merger cost AT&T $108.7 Billion since AT&T also inherited about $25 Billion in TW debt.

(continuing from below) The real question is not about accounting vs finance, it's whether or not they should have bought TW. That's a strategic decision, and a bet-the-company decision on the direction of the market.

No matter what strategy AT&T took, they would not be alone. For example, Comcast is a effectively a telecom conglomerate now with a big content division (NBCUniversal, which just launched the Peacock streaming service). On the other hand, Verizon is sticking to it's core competency, and is focusing on wireless.

AT&T hires investment bankers to work on the deal; the team doing the valuation does not need to be kept on staff. Each side of the TW deal are estimated to have paid $80 million to $120 million in advisory fees. Hopefully for that amount they did sufficient work to come up with a fair valuation. However, a lot of valuation relies on projections of efficiencies, growth, and so on. It's certainly not an exact science.

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/23/business/dealbook/who-behind-att-time-warner-deal.html