I was updating my statistics on AT&T now that it has finally closed its merger with BellSouth. We all just accept that the new AT&T is a big company, and the merger’s opponents have, at times, painted the telco as a multi-tenacled sea monster capable of smashing down competition.
The fears sparked by the merger’s opponents are exaggerated, but there’s no getting around the fact that the new AT&T is just one big honking company. Take annual revenues —- for the last four quarters, AT&T and BellSouth combined generated $84.4 billion (see table at end), which would make the company around the 37th biggest corporation in the world, according to Fortune Global 500 rankings. The only other telecom company that tops AT&T on this measure is Nippon Telephone and Telegraph, which is expected to generate $94.9 billion in revenue for 2006. But the new AT&T is far more profitable than NTT — the combined company generated $10.6 billion in net income over the past four quarters, compared to NTT’s 2006 profit of only $4.4 billion.
AT&T also tops the U.S. mobile voice subscriber charts (58.7 million through Cingular, soon to be renamed AT&T, Wireless) and high-speed subscriptions (11.6 million DSL subscriptions at the end of Q3 06, compared to Comcast, which counted 11 million cable modem subscribers at the end of Q3 06).
I don’t believe, as some reports suggest, that AT&T is in the process of reassembling the old Ma Bell system, also known as, well, AT&T. Fueled by technological innovations, the marketplace has changed too dramatically for a single telecommunications company to ever again monopolize the growing array of communications services. But still, the new AT&T is big and a far more potent force than most companies in the world.
| Selected Key Statistics for Combined AT&T-BellSouth | |||||
| 3Q05 | 4Q05 | 1Q06 | 2Q06 | 3Q06 | |
| Total access lines (mil.) | 70.62 | 69.45 | 68.57 | 67.25 | 66.13 |
| DSL customers (000) | 9,174 | 9,803 | 10,577 | 11,047 | 11,597 |
| Video (000) | 879 | 980 | 1,119 | 1,224 | 1,342 |
| Wireless Voice Customers (000) | 52,292 | 54,144 | 55,810 | 57,308 | 58,666 |
| Total operating revenues (mil.) | $21,540 | $21,479 | $21,006 | $21,016 | $20,856 |
| Net Income (mil.) | $ 2,546 | $ 2,480 | $ 2,229 | $ 2,695 | $ 3,224 |
| Source: Emerging Media Dynamics, Inc. analysis of company data. © 2007. | |||||
Cynthia Brumfield at 4:08 PM|Comments(0)
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