One may wonder why AT&T's financial statements are in its current situation? The reason is because of the recent financial decisions such as issuance of stock, acquisitions, and spin offs. A recent financial decision made by AT&T was DoCoMo's purchase of AT&T stock prior to the spin-off of AT&T Wireless. AT&T and NTT DoCoMo have created a symbiotic financial alliance endeavor. AT&T sold a significant portion of their AT&T shares in February 2002 and received $382 million in cash from DoCoMo's purchase of 26.7 million shares of AT&T's common stock during the TeleCorp acquisition (2002). As seen in the chart below, NTT DoCoMo's holdings total a little less than 500 million.
(chart)