AT&T (T) is one of the most tried-and-true dividend stocks in the S&P 500. It has increased its dividend for 33 years in a row.
AT&T is a Dividend Aristocrat, a group of 51 stocks in the S&P 500 with 25+ consecutive years of dividend increases.
AT&T recently released first-quarter earnings, and the results were mixed.
The company met analyst estimates on earnings-per-share, and benefited from strong customer additions in wireless.
At the same time, AT&T came up short on quarterly revenue, and saw a significant uptick in postpaid customer losses.
The good news is that while competition is heating up, AT&T has the financial resources to adapt to the changing environment.
This article will discuss AT&T’s first-quarter performance, and why it remains a high-quality dividend stock.
Quarterly Performance Overview
Among the highlights from AT&T’s first quarter performance:
AT&T’s earnings-per-share matched analyst expectations, while revenue fell short by about $1.16 billion. This was a considerable miss on revenue.
In the same quarter of 2016, AT&T reported earnings-per-share of $0.72, on revenue of $40.5 billion. So while AT&T’s quarterly revenue declined 2.8% year over year, earnings-per-share increased by 2.8%.
Source: Q1 Presentation, page 5
One reason for the declining revenue was low equipment sales, including weak phone sales.
However, the company successfully cut costs to grow earnings. Another bright spot was AT&T’s stronger-than-expected wireless network additions.
AT&T’s 2.7 million wireless adds last quarter came in well ahead of the 2.08 million analysts had expected.
However, an area of concern for AT&T is that it lost 191,000 postpaid phone subscribers in the first quarter. That said, AT&T still fared much better than its major competitor Verizon Communications (VZ), which lost 289,000 postpaid wireless subscribers in the first quarter.
