AT&T will slash $3 billion off its capital investments next year

Enlarge / An AT&T repair truck. (credit: Mike Mozart / Flickr)

AT&T is planning to spend just $20 billion on capital investment in 2020, down from $23 billion this year.

AT&T announced the $20 billion forecast for 2020 Monday in its quarterly earnings. A year ago, AT&T said it would spend $23 billion on gross capital investment in 2019. (These numbers include network construction and vendor-financing payments but do not include some spending on AT&T's FirstNet public safety network, which is reimbursed by the federal government.)

The company is on pace to exceed its 2019 goal as it averaged more than $6 billion per quarter in the first three quarters. But with a forecast of $20 billion across all of 2020, AT&T expects to spend about $5 billion per quarter on capital investments going forward. The company is under pressure from investors to control spending, in part because its TV business is tanking and because of AT&T's giant debt load stemming from the purchases of DirecTV and Time Warner.

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