Closing Bell - Closing Bell Overtime+ AT&T CEO John Stankey 9/9/25

Episode Date: September 9, 2025

CNBC’s Morgan Brennan sits down with AT&T CEO John Stankey to discuss what the iPhone refresh cycle means for business, forward guidance and more.

Today's iPhone event, not just a big deal for Apple. The wireless provider is also hoping to benefit from a potential refresh cycle for more on the Apple event. And much more, let's get to our Morgan Brennan at Goldman Sachs Community Copia Conference. Morning, Morgan. Good morning, Carl. And joining me now is John Stanky, the CEO of AT&T. It's great to be here with you. Well, thanks for having me here, Morgan.

So you just got off stage. You basically reiterated your guidance for the full year, longer term as well. What drives it? Look, we're having good success, not only growing our customer base right now. both in fiber and wireless and we're growing with the right customers but we've done a really good job of streamlining the business so we're managing our expense dynamics pretty well the combination of those things getting some decent growth on the top end and ultimately getting more efficient how we operate the business drives the kind of cash generation that we need to continue to

reinvest in this business so it's a really good thing as you want to get into all those reinvestments in swell but first not too far away from here in cooperino we have an event from apple later today. How closely are you watching this new lineup of iPhones? What does it mean for AT&T? Well, it's obviously important to a large portion of our customer base that use those devices, so we do watch it closely. And, you know, I've obviously worked with Apple for many years as a partner in distributing their equipment. I'm not expecting it's going to be anything, what I would call earth-shattering or frame-breaking. But every time... You're not anticipating a super cycle. I'm not anticipating the infamous super cycle,

but who knows, the customer will ultimately decide that. If they, find something compelling in the device that they don't have and they decide that they want to go and reinvest in them, then we'll be ready to do that. But ultimately, what we care about is we want to make sure that they've got great opportunities to use the right devices on our network and make sure that the network works incredibly well. We're really excited about some of the work we've been doing to improve our wireless operations and reinvest in our wireless network. In terms of consumers and wireless subscribers, you've talked about the fact that maybe the second half of the year is less promotional. What does that mean in terms of the business for

AT&T and what you're seeing in consumer behavior? Yeah, we've actually viewed that we think the level of dynamics that are going on in the industry right now competitively probably sustain themselves through the balance of the year. So I don't know that it's necessarily going to be less promotional. We'll certainly see, you know, the cycle tick up as we get into the holiday season, as it typically does. You know, our goal right now is to make sure we can meet the customer where they want to be and we think we're in a position to do that. Frankly, our goal and how we're focused on it is we really want customers who want to buy a portfolio services from us, not just wireless devices, but they want to buy fiber broadband or they want to buy their broadband

services from us that we can offer on a fixed basis from our wireless network. And we're really focusing our promotions and what we're doing with customers is finding those converge customers because they have higher lifetime value. They tend to have a higher point of view of the brand of the company when they use both services. They churn less, which is great for us. And that longer sustainable relationship is really healthy for our company. And that's how we think about going into this cycle. And we've been pretty successful doing that during the early part of this year driving our percentage of customers that are converged up above 40% now. So you're making big investments into fiber looking to double that footprint by 2030.

You also made a big investment, announced a big investment in Spectrum with Echo Star $23 billion a couple of weeks ago. Do you want to get your thoughts on Echo Star's most recent deal yesterday with SpaceX for Starlink because that did send telecom stocks, including AT&T, lower. Yeah, I'm sure that they're, you know, as usual, whenever news breaks, sometimes people take a little bit of time to process it. My point of view is that what SpaceX is doing is, in most cases, complementary to the wireless industry. It's an important aspect of consumers don't want to fall off the internet. They always want to be connected. And whether it's SpaceX or AST or Kuiper, they're all looking at bringing new technology in place.

It's going to effectively allow the customer to always be connected. And I think as a company that provides most of that mobile connectivity, we're going to be a great distributor of those services moving forward. And my hope would be that there's more than one player that offers satellite services and more than one player that offers wholesale arrangements that I think will be really healthy for the industry and really good for the consumer when that occurs. It's not a surprise that SpaceX did what they did.

We work pretty closely with the company called AST Space Mobile. They had made a spectrum purchase recently. We know that SpaceX, we know that Kuiper are both out looking for opportunities to have directed device spectrum, that they can offer those services as well. So obviously working with Echo Star as a counterparty in our spectrum negotiations with them had an idea of where they wanted to go

and what they thought would happen there and when that happened I said here we go and that's it's a good thing for the consumer we need to work with that ecosystem and bring good products to the consumer as a result of that and I think we can so potential partners with a SpaceX even though you aren't invested in an AST Space Mobile

and partner will see where things go I don't expect that anybody who builds that kind of infrastructure is probably going to be exclusive to any particular carrier if they're going to monetize it and ultimately make money off of it. How does AI and this new age of autonomy, huge topic here at this conference and in general for investors,

how does it change, how does it change connectivity? How much is that driving these investments you are making? Well, look, I think what you're seeing, why does somebody go out and choose to buy the spectrum that they bought? Why did we choose to do that? Why did SpaceX do it? When we talk about building another 30 million homes of fiber, that's based on this fact that we think connectivity

that we think connectivity in the future is going to be incredibly important and it's it's not just us investing at record levels it's others and it's great to be in that space it's great to be in an industry where it's going to matter and in my view that connectivity to support things like a i to support machine learning and machine vision those are going to require really high-performing networks networks that can not only be highly secure but deliver incredibly engineered levels of latency and performance. And the only way somebody is successful in that space is if they own and operate all that fabric of network, whether it's a mobile network or a fixed network or anything in between, they have to own and operate that infrastructure and engineer it in a way

where they can make sure that that session, that bit, what that customer is doing, can be tracked and managed all the way through those networks to deliver the kind of performance that's necessary to bring the promise of AI and all those services forward. And so that's how we're assembling our assets as a business to put us in that position. And I think others see that connectivity is going to be really critical to enabling that. And I'm really pleased that we're in that business because we're going to be better at it than anybody else. Well, John Stanky, CEO of AT&T. It's great to be with you here at Goldman Sachs Communicopia and Technology Conference.

Thank you. Thanks for having me at Morgan.