Tough Year for Telecoms So Far & AT&T Has Interesting Times Ahead Without iPhone Exclusivity

It has been a tough 2009 so far for U.S. phone companies. You can see the year-to-date (YTD) charts for AT&T (blue), Verizon (green) and Deutsche Telekom AG (red – European owner of T-Mobile USA). I left Sprint out of this chart. But, we’ll get back to them. As you can see Deutsche Telekom stock price is down more that 20% so far this year. AT&T stock price is down about 11% and Verizon is down about 7%.