Dallas-based AT&T plans to trim another $2 billion in expenses over the next three years, the company said on Wednesday in a quarterly earnings call with investors.
AT&T met a previous target of $6 billion in savings ahead of schedule, the company said, by closing retail stores and satellite offices and replacing older network infrastructure, The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported.
A growing wireless business has generated most of the telecom giant’s profits, with a net gain of 326,000 customers in the last quarter, the newspaper reported.
AT&T said profits rose to $4.49 billion from $4.16 billion a year earlier.
The company has been battling rivals Verizon and T-Mobile for new cellphone users while increasing its fiber-optic network.
“We believe that a deliberate review, in collaboration with the EPA and our industry partners with reliable science at the forefront, is the responsible way to evaluate this issue,” CEO John Stankey said during the earnings call.
Stankey said he expects AT&T will meet its 2023 projections for 3% adjusted earnings growth and free cash flow of $16 billion, the newspaper said.
AT&T was one of several Telecom stocks that fell on Wall Street earlier this month. The WSJ reported the company had lead-clad telephone cables that could pose public health hazards.
As previously reported by The Dallas Express, AT&T said the cables make up less than 10% of its 2-million-mile nationwide network.
“Independent experts, long-standing science have given us no reason to believe these cables pose a public health risk,” Stankey said on the earnings call, Reuters reported.
In a recent filing to the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of California, AT&T said it “strongly disagrees with [WSJ’s] reporting” and claimed that its own commissioned tests yielded different results.
“More than two-thirds of its lead-clad cabling is either buried or in conduit, followed by aerial cable, and with a very small portion running underwater,” the filing read.