AT&T Looks To Cut Billions In Costs: Are More Employee Layoffs Coming?

AT&T (T) is reportedly planning to cut costs by tens of billions of dollars, including the elimination of an undisclosed number of jobs.

AT&T President and COO John Stankey told investors on Tuesday, that the company is looking at “headcount rationalization,” which would include job cuts company-wide.

“In the near term, things that fall in that short-term bucket, I already talked to you about some of them, some of the headcount-rationalization work we're doing on overhead, some of the benefit restructuring that we've done that we've already communicated out that get us a good way to some of our objectives this year,” Stankey told investors, according to transcripts posted by AT&T from Reuters.

“We have some additional work we can do in that area. We have some short-term opportunities on how we deal with third-party costs, supplier costs that we'll be pushing on. We have some near-term opportunities in our call-center structure that we're working on.”

AT&T has been cutting costs, freeing up more than $1.6 billion in capital expenditures in 2019, and cutting more than $3 billion in capital investment cost in 2020, ARS Technica reported. AT&T reported $181.2 billion in revenue in 2019, with a net income of $13.9 billion. The company has seen its debt reduce from $163.1 billion to $151.3 billion at the end of 2019.

This is not the first layoffs to come from AT&T as the company reportedly reduced its workforce from 268,220 to 247,800 in 2019.

Shares of AT&T stock were down 2.50% as of 3:32 p.m. EST on Thursday.