(Bloomberg) -- Dish Network Corp., the satellite TV provider, fell the most in 19 months after reporting fresh subscriber losses and offering little evidence of progress on construction of its 5G wireless network.
Shares of the Englewood, Colorado-based company slumped as much as 15% to $36.44 in New York, marking the worst intraday drop since March 2020.
Dish lost 13,000 pay-TV subscribers in the third quarter, according to a statement Thursday, reducing its total TV customer base to 10.98 million. On the wireless front, the company lost 121,000 subscribers.
Dish never said it would be easy to morph into a mobile internet provider. But the company has said it could be done for $10 billion in capital outlays. Now investors are starting to see a bigger tab, including a $5 billion network-sharing deal with AT&T Inc. and billions of dollars more in long-term tower leases.
“We still don’t know whether the $10 billion construction budget estimate Dish has floated so often will turn out to be reasonable,” Craig Moffett with MoffettNathanson LLC wrote in a note Thursday.
Adding to the concern is the fact that the company’s commercial launch of the first-ever, cloud-based 5G network, which was expected earlier this year, is nowhere on the near horizon.
On an earnings call with analysts, Dish executives said they were still working to integrate software at the core of the network with software out at the antenna endpoints.
Such tech delays are a minor hitch in the big picture, according to co-founder and Chairman Charlie Ergen.
“The marketplace doesn’t always get it right in the short term,” Ergen said on the call. “It’s on us to execute and then give people the road map to see why the investment in Dish is a smart investment. And we certainly have work to do there.”
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