Goldman Sachs’ List Of Stocks Popular With Mutual Fund Managers: Top 20 Stocks

5. AT&T Inc. (NYSE:T)

Number of  Mutual Funds: 24

Number of Hedge Fund Investors in Q2 2024: 71

AT&T Inc. (NYSE:T) is an iconic American telecommunications carrier that has been in business in one form or another since the 1800s. The firm provides broadband internet, telephony, and other connectivity services. The diversified product portfolio allows AT&T Inc. (NYSE:T) to benefit from cross selling like insurance companies as it can offer telephony or internet products to users that use only one of these services. AT&T Inc. (NYSE:T)’s size, as evidenced by its trailing twelve month net income of $12.5 billion is at the center of its hypothesis. This is in the form of the firm using its existing network coverage to penetrate the fiber internet market. Additionally, the firm has set ambitious goals of covering millions of homes through 5G networks, and these efforts could be helped by AT&T Inc. (NYSE:T)’s focus on becoming a pure play telecommunications company as evidenced by its recent sale of Dish.

AT&T Inc. (NYSE:T)’s management commented on 5G and fiber during the Q2 2024 earnings call:

“The durable trends in 5G and fiber are being driven by more than the solid individual execution within each business. We believe the success of our fiber business is driving growth in mobility and vice-versa as consumers increasingly prefer to purchase mobility and broadband together as a converged service. For example, today, nearly four out of every 10 AT&T Fiber households also choose AT&T as their wireless provider. As a result, our share of postpaid phone subscribers within the AT&T Fiber footprint is about 500 basis points higher than our national average. In our fiber business, we continue to achieve key penetration milestones faster than we anticipated and considerably faster than the fiber providers that do not operate wireless networks based on publicly available data.

A key reason for the strong performance is our ability to sell fiber to our mobile customers. Additionally, we’re able to reach new broadband customers through our substantial mobile distribution channels. The key point here is that our proven ability to drive higher share in both mobility and broadband through converged service penetration is the true benefit of owning and operating both 5G and fiber networks at scale. Over time, we expect this to drive greater returns on invested capital in both our mobility and broadband businesses than either would be expected to achieve as standalone operations. While our convergent strategy began with a focus on our owned fiber footprint, we also see attractive opportunities to expand the availability of AT&T Fiber, and our converged offers outside of it.”