I’ve seen reference to an interview with Stankey basically admitted “had he been doing his job” he would’ve noticed trouble early on. Does anybody have a link to that interview?
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Link: https://research.tdameritrade.com/grid/public/research/stocks/news/article?dockey=1-SN20230523005036-005036
Stankey told investors at a JPMorgan conference Monday that AT&T's business has been "changing a lot," leading to cash flow that's lighter in the first quarter of the year as AT&T deals with its evolved supply base, market position and investment plans.
But, he admitted, "I was wrong" not to recognize how Wall Street would come to view such a light quarter of free-cash flow, especially in the wake of a guidance cut on the metric a year earlier.
"Clearly, our investor base is not enamored with that lumpiness," Stankey said at the conference, according to a transcript provided by AlphaSense/Sentieo. "So as a management team, [we've] got to step back and ask ourselves, what do we need to do to start architecting the business a little bit differently to accept the fact that investors would like to see a little bit more predictability and ratability around it?"
Stankey acknowledged that investors would acutely remember the recent past, when AT&T ended up having to bring down its full-year free-cash flow expectations for 2022. That's something management doesn't anticipate having to do this time around, even with the slower start to the year.
"Probably if I was doing my job right, probably [I] should have stumbled to that earlier and probably should have immediately understood that given what took place in 2022, that people would, without listening to what's being said or whatever data was put out there, go to a 'déjà vu all over again' moment, [and] say, here we are again, we're just going through this process that occurred in the early part of '22 to guide down on cash."
He was talking about the response to the cash flow stuff.