AT&T Keeps Buying Back Shares

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By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated Published
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AT&T Inc. (NYSE: T) is yet another company that has given up on opportunities for innovation and has lost its appetite for large M&A transactions. Instead, it will use the power of its balance sheet to buy back more shares — a means often used to improve earnings per share, among other things.

The company announced:

The board of directors of AT&T Inc. today declared a quarterly dividend of $0.45 a share on the company’s common shares. The dividend is payable on May 1, 2013, to stockholders of record at the close of business on April 10, 2013.

At the same time, the board authorized the repurchase of up to 300 million shares, representing approximately 5.5 percent of AT&T common shares outstanding, with no expiration date. This authorization is in addition to two other 300 million share repurchase authorizations approved by the board of directors in December 2010 and July 2012. The company completed repurchases under the December 2010 share authorization last year.

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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.

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