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A Tale Of Two Telcos
The last few years have been the best of times and worst of times respectively for Verizon (NYSE:VZ) and AT&T (NYSE:T). AT&T’s former management made large, ill-advised acquisitions of DirecTV in 2015 and TimeWarner in 2018. While Verizon made its own questionable media acquisition with Yahoo in 2017, it was much smaller and less of a drag on overall performance. The market certainly punished AT&T for these decisions as we see in the total return performance of the stock compared to Verizon’s. The chart below covers the period from the closure of the Time Warner merger on 6/15/2018 to the announcement of the spinoff of WarnerMedia (WBD) on 2/1/2022. AT&T delivered no return in that time frame even including dividends while Verizon returned over 30%.
Seeking Alpha
Even before the media spinoff was announce however, AT&T stock has been quietly…
