Most earnings reports occurred last week with Amazon (this Tuesday) and Alphabet/ Google (Thursday) remaining to report. Even with the DeepSeek AI announcement last weekend (and the subsequent market selloff last Monday), the Fab Five managed to gain $54 billion last week and $402 billion over the last fortnight.
The Telco Top Five have all reported earnings, and generally the market has honed in on 1-2 key operating metrics to reward or punish each stock. For T-Mobile, it was postpaid monthly phone churn, which came in at 0.92% for the quarter, a full 4 basis points lower than a year ago. This accounted for ~87,000 of their phone postpaid net add surprise. We will have additional details on T-Mobile’s “strength on strength” 4Q report in next week’s full Brief.
T-Mobile also announced that one of their current Board members, Srinivasan Gopalan, was going to become the company’s COO (announcement here). We caution against reading too much into any of this outside of the fact that the company needs a COO (Mike Sievert served as COO from 2015-2020 and picked up the President title along the way in 2018). Being able to attract an insider who knows the Board is a bonus. We wish Srini all the best and encourage him to sign up for The Sunday Brief.
The other item that should have been mentioned in last Sunday’s Brief is the AT&T real estate announcement made shortly before earnings (here). It could simply be read as an $850 million sale leaseback transaction for 13 million square feet of central office space (as the announcement notes, it’s actually the second such transaction with Reign Capital – the first one was smaller in 2021). We think of this transaction as the beginning of billions in such long overdue transactions across the telecom industry. We wll make sure to draw distinctions between this announcement and Verizon’s AI real estate and power announcement made the week prior.
In the next Brief, we will have updated share counts and schedules (except for Altice’s postpaid net adds). Many insights that will need to wait until next week. File is below.
Go Chiefs!
