This is an old post but is right on the money. Great read
http://michaelrhearants.blogspot.com/2015/09/at-ceo-randall-stephenson-should.html
6 replies (most recent on top)
Carly fiorina would be a good replacement, is all about his legacy, jumping ship before,...
The post bellow is 100% on target. Who in the hell purchased an outdated technology like directtv especially for $48B. If they really wanted it they could of waited until directtv was going down in value. I guess Ramdall figured that in order to hide how badly AT&T was doing he needed to purchase another company and gain some short term increase in stock price.
Back in 1999-2001 during the first dot com bust. Whitacre had the chance to buy hundreds of thousands of miles of dark fiber for pennies on the dollar from all the fiber companies going under. He thought plain ol' DSL was good enough for everyone going forward. Instead, he did stupid shit like buying Prodigy and chasing a deal with Earthlink which never came to pass. Guess who bought up all that fiber? Google.
The Direct TV purchase really reminds me of those blunders. Buying a dinosaur who is staring at an incoming meteor. We could have spent that money buying up popular content and technology for whatever streaming service we launch. The service can have a crappy interface as long as they have good content (Hulu, Amazon); but content is the key.
Very well stated. We are running like chickens with their heads cut off. This will get us nowhere. Instead of purchasing out dated technology we should of invested in gigapower as the posted stated. I think the reasons things are this child tic is because AT&T is in trouble so they are in panick mode
In my opinion we need to be focusing less on becoming a competitor of Netflix and Amazon and start focusing on our GigaPower and 5G LTE services if we really want to connect people everywhere. It's obvious the trend is cutting the cable on cable tv-it's outdated technology-the millennials are an "on demand" generation who have grown up on YouTube, Hulu, Netflix and other services. Randall needs to look himself in the mirror and admit to himself that he's focusing on too many things at the same time. We should have a few priorities and focus on those instead of having the plethora of business ventures he wants to pursue.
It just matter of time.... Al CEO's rise and fall like the sun, AT the stock will be revalued to meet higher rate expectations. While T's current yield is enticing, it's less so when you consider you could get a $2 or $3 selloff in pretty short order if/when rates begin to rise off of their very low current levels.
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