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Jon Keegan

AT&T beats on revenue, adds more wireless and fiber customers, will see big savings from tax bill

AT&T posted solid second-quarter earnings, beating estimates, and plans to use $6.5 billion to $8 billion in tax savings from President Trump’s tax bill to build out its fiber business. However, the stock is slumping in premarket trading, as the company’s full-year profit guidance failed to impress.

The company posted $30.8 billion in revenue, up 3.5% year on year, beating estimates of $30.4 billion on higher wireless and consumer sales. Adjusted earnings per share came in at $0.54, beating FactSet analysts’ expectations of $0.53.

Net income for Q2 was $4.9 billion, up from $3.9 billion from the same period in the year prior.

The company saw 401,000 postpaid phone net additions (new monthly subscriptions, minus lost customers) for the quarter.

Mobility service revenue was $16.9 billion, up 3.5% year on year, while consumer fiber broadband revenues were up 18.9% from Q2 2024 to $2.1 billion. The company added 243,000 new fiber subscribers.

AT&T Chairman and CEO John Stankey said in the earnings release:

“We are winning in a highly competitive marketplace, with the nation’s largest wireless and fiber networks.”

Guidance for the full year calls for adjusted earnings per share of between $1.97 and $2.07, and capital expenditures between $22 billion and $25 billion. That profit estimate may be the fly in the ointment here: even the high end of that range is below the consensus estimate of $2.09, per analysts polled by Bloomberg.

The company also said it’s expecting “low double-digit” declines in business wireless EBITDA.

The company said it expects to see $6.5 billion to $8 billion of cash tax savings between 2025 and 2027, thanks to Trump’s tax bill that was just signed into law. Of those savings, $3.5 billion will go into accelerating its fiber internet network, and the company expects to reach 60 million fiber customers when including the Lumen Technologies customers it agreed to acquire.

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Oil settles Friday at highest level since start of war

US oil prices moved higher in afternoon trading Friday, sapping strength from the stock market as they posted their highest close since the start of the Iran war.

After another day where the Strait of Hormuz was essentially closed to global tanker traffic, US futures for West Texas Intermediate settled up 3.1% at $98.71 a barrel for an 8.6% weekly gain, per Dow Jones data.

American officials have discussed using the US Navy to escort tankers through the narrow waterway between Iran and Oman, but have said plans for such convoys are not ready yet. However, it is unclear if military convoys would bring an end to the war-related dislocations in the oil market.

“It could help,” Tom Liles, senior vice president of upstream research at energy consulting firm Rystad, told Sherwood News in a recent interview. “It could also go in a lot of different directions if a Navy ship is hit or if a tanker is hit.”

American officials have discussed using the US Navy to escort tankers through the narrow waterway between Iran and Oman, but have said plans for such convoys are not ready yet. However, it is unclear if military convoys would bring an end to the war-related dislocations in the oil market.

“It could help,” Tom Liles, senior vice president of upstream research at energy consulting firm Rystad, told Sherwood News in a recent interview. “It could also go in a lot of different directions if a Navy ship is hit or if a tanker is hit.”

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Memory stocks rebound off last weeks losses

Memory stocks Micron, Sandisk, Western Digital, and Seagate Technology Holdings rose again Friday, putting these crucial providers of chips for AI inference work on track for big weekly gains after last week’s steep losses following the outbreak of war with Iran.

There’s no obvious trigger for the move higher for these shares this week, other than a bit of a recovery in the AI trade more broadly — AI beneficiaries like IT cable and connections maker Amphenol and custom chip and networking company Marvell Technology clawed back some gains this week — perhaps due Oracle’s earnings earlier, and some mean reversion to boot.

Micron is due to report earnings after the close of trading on Wednesday, with the company catching a couple price target hikes this week, including one from Wedbush on Friday.

Sandisk is something of a different story, as its enormous gains over the last 12 months — roughly 1,200% — have made it a momentum play beloved by the retail crowd.

It was up about 20% this week at around 11 a.m. ET. And its nearly 170% gain this year keeps the stock on top of the S&P 500, in terms of price performance.

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