Hi Chip, I think that T is oversold and ready for a
bounce to 40 or into the mid 40's.
Bigger picture, they have taken on a lot of debt and
have accumulated large cable properties , and must hope
that cable is the last mile winner in the broadband
rollout to the customer.
I am very cautious on T beyond a trading bounce.
and the fact that HLIT has been such a big customer, has had
me a bit cautious on HLIT as well.
I may have mentioned that about HLIT 3 or 5 months ago.
Here is a nice rundown by Jim Seymour, who knows his
technology.
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Mike Armstrong's Dumb Decision
By Jim Seymour
Special to TheStreet.com
6/9/00 3:18 PM ET
On a Yahoo! (YHOO:Nasdaq - news - boards) chat with Jim Cramer last night -- you can find the transcript here; I think you'll enjoy it -- I said AT&T (T:NYSE - news - boards) has turned into a heart-breaker of the highest order. A number of TSC subscribers who were on the chat wrote overnight and Friday morning to ask why I'd changed my mind.
After all, a year ago I thought AT&T was a promising investment.
You bet I did. But a year -- a week, even a day! -- can change things a lot in this business. And AT&T is a great example:
AT&T is caught in a downward spiral -- almost a death spiral, the business equivalent of a pilot's terrifying flat spin -- on revenue from its voice-based long distance. That shouldn't be a surprise -- the voice business stinks for everybody, with market-rate per-minute charges plummeting through four cents and rapidly approaching zero -- but it's a bigger deal for AT&T than for most of its competitors, because AT&T still has a huge long-distance business. Just not a very profitable one.
Though I applauded AT&T's moves last year to become a "single-pipe" provider of all sorts of digital services to the home -- from voice to fast data connections to cable service -- the problems have proved overwhelming.
The cable business, especially -- despite AT&T's semi-successes here in the regulatory arena -- is a swamp. AT&T wanted that cable line into your home as a delivery mechanism for lots of profitable noncable services and also as a "last-mile" answer, cutting off the local-loop carriers' control of your service.
But so many problems still stand in the way of providing constant, high-reliability phone service over the cable systems for which AT&T spent so much money that I'm beginning to wonder if the company will ever unravel that one. As opposed to its forecast of two million cable-telephony customers by the end of this year, I doubt that AT&T will have 500,000. Maybe not even 400,000. Not good.
AT&T has been showing a political clumsiness more characteristic of "the old AT&T" than of CEO Mike Armstrong's reign.
The idiotic long-distance rate increase it unilaterally imposed on customers earlier this month -- bumping its nondiscounted residential long-distance customers up to a 24x7 flat rate of 29 cents a minute, up 81% from the former weekday rate and a whopping 152% hike on weekends! -- showed that. The company this week rescinded that increase ... but then this morning Armstrong is saying in The Wall Street Journal that he's going to refile a new tariff schedule that will have much the same effect.
"I am not going to give this up," he said.
A tip, Mike: Give it up.
The irony, of course, is that AT&T badly needs those higher long-distance revenues. But with everybody and his brother offering nickel-a-minute calling, how can AT&T possibly ask six times as much?
Doing this at a time when the FCC is already growling about the company's moves is political insanity. Has it hired the same strategy advisors who guided Microsoft (MSFT: - news - boards)(MSFT:Nasdaq) over the past year?
With the stock down by half, Armstrong's reign -- once so solid and promising -- is starting to look shaky. But who'd want the job?
As I said last night on Yahoo!, "T is a heart-breaker. I'm scared of it -- too many uncertainties, too many regulatory and tech pits ahead. I don't need that grief."
Neither, I suspect, do you.
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