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Again, similar to the balance sheet, the cash flow statement below summarizes AT&T's cash flow in the past three years. Their cash flow from financing activities is their dividend paid (negative $555,000,000) plus their sales purchase of stock (2,684,000,000) minus the net borrowings (negative $8,169,000,000) totals to a deficit $6,041,000,000 million. This is an abrupt decline from two years prior when AT&T had close to $26 billion in cash flows.
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The figures in the statements show the effect of the issuance of AT&T stock to NTT DoCoMo, the subsequent spin off and their long term financing. Optimistically, it seems that these financial decisions will prove that these actions are beneficial and will be even more so as time passes; however, the underlying question still remains: Are the long term debts and issuance of stock beneficial to AT&T? To answer the question, one needs to determine how the decisions affected AT&T compared to their top three competitors: Sprint PCS, Verizon, and WorldCom in terms of annual sales, profitability, financial ratios and overall growth.
Based on the table below, it shows that Verizon produces the most annual sales whereas AT&T and WorldCom's produced annual sales similar to each other. Sprint on the other hand is producing about 50% of Verizon's annual sales.
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