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From our analysis, we found the following most relevant:Unfortunately, it appears that the pandemic is more like the 'new normal,'and may impact operations in future periods even more significantly than it did during the first quarter."
When AT&T Inc US:T posted first-quarter results in late April, it disclosed in the second line of its release that it saw adjusted earnings per share "of $0.84 ($0.89 without COVID-19 impact)." Later in its release, AT&T said it "did not adjust for COVID-19 costs of about $0.05 in the quarter" since the company expected the costs to be "short term."
The company did not break down the drivers of that earnings impact in its release, but provided some more detail in a supplemental investor-briefing fileCOVID-19 is leading to new non-GAAP metrics.and could prompt companies to dump all sorts of costs into periods affected by the crisis
The practice of adjusting away COVID-19 impacts from financial metrics has been the subject of jokes on Twitter, including by those who designed coffee mugs to satirize the idea of earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, amortization, and coronavirus, dubbed EBITDAC.
The COVID-19 outbreak has brought out some creative accounting at companies, as executives attempt to gauge the impact of the pandemic on their businesses and how they would have performed if the crisis hadn't all but shut the economy down.
Before companies began reporting first-quarter earnings, Twitter users joked that the outbreak would prompt new non-standard metrics that could be summarized as "earnings before COVID-19," or EBITDAC, and they even created a series of coffee mugs that satirized the conceptThe company increased its adjusted net revenue by $19 million to add back "payments for financial assistance to drivers personally impacted by COVID-19."
It increased adjusted Ebitda by $24 million to remove those relief payments to drivers along with the costs of personal protective equipment given to drivers.
Uber did not respond to a request for comment