AT&T higher as Stankey touts strength in HBO and fiber, and Discovery deal moves on
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AT&T (NYSE:T) is 3.4% higher today after it says HBO and HBO Max ended 2021 with about 73.8 million total subscribers, ahead of management guidance for 70 million-73 million.
That's particularly notable as the story in September - when HBO dropped out of Amazon's (NASDAQ:AMZN) Prime Video Channels program - was that WarnerMedia was confident that despite the hit of a few million subscribers, it could still reach 70 million subs by the end of 2021.

HBO and HBO Max were around 69.4 million subs at the end of Q3.
Asked at Citi's investor conference just now where the outperformance came from, AT&T (T) CEO John Stankey praised "really good international launches."
HBO and Max is "now a product that has moved from not only a domestic strength" to a global product that "has got momentum in Latin America throughout the entire continent" and "early launches in Europe have been really strong."
In other end-of-year numbers that the company is disclosing, it says total postpaid net adds reached 1.3 million in Q4, including about 880,000 postpaid phones.
That brings full-year 2021 postpaid phone net adds to 3.2 million, the company's best annual figure there in more than a decade.
It also added about 270,000 fiber subscribers for the quarter, which brings full-year fiber net adds to about 1 million, the fourth straight year it's hit 1 million subs or more in fiber. It ended the year with an additional 2.6 million fiber customer locations, ahead of its expectation for 2.5 million.
As for the company's goal of reaching 30 million fiber households by the end of 2025: "We're very confident we'll get that done," Stankey says.
On the Warner Bros. Discovery media spin-off/merger, Stankey says the transaction is moving exactly according to plan (which envisioned a mid-2022 wrap-up). "We're really pleased about the private letter ruling; you've seen we filed our S-4," Stankey says, and the next big step is moving toward the Discovery (NASDAQ:DISCA) shareholder vote now that the European Union has cleared the transaction.
Asked about why investors should bank on a stake in AT&T, Stankey says "It's the most undervalued player in the telecom/media space right now."
"I can't imagine given the yield on the dividend right now" - forward yield is sitting just a bit over 8% - that investors can beat "what you can get paid to wait" for the Discovery transaction to go through, Stankey says. In the end, for AT&T's valuation, "the confidence of the investor base has to attach to the confidence of the management team."
AT&T and peer Verizon have been gaining recently amid some removed hurdles on deployment of 5G C-band airwaves.