•You will hear the CEO of AT&T telling about the achievements of the company in

A year ago, AT&T staked its claim as "The world’s networking company" -- the technology leader that customers can trust and turn to not just for long distance services, but for all their critical networking and communications needs. At the same time, we committed to grow our business in such emerging areas as Internet Protocol (IP) and bundled services, while also improving our customer focus and our overall financial strength and flexibility.
Despite the challenges of an unpredictable and often turbulent telecom market, I’m proud to note that AT&T’s results in 2003 demonstrate solid progress in each of these critical areas. Through ongoing innovation and investment, AT&T has transformed itself in many important ways, successfully positioning the company as a leading "provider of choice" in the complex new age of networking and communications. While our transformation is ongoing, we’re today delivering an increasingly robust mix of domestic residential services and sophisticated business networking solutions to customers around the globe. Customer satisfaction is high, our balance sheet is strong and we’re poised to lead the industry into a powerful new era of communications capability and performance.
We’re already seeing signs of much-needed consolidation in the wireless space. And while this is a positive and necessary development, AT&T is not sitting idly by, awaiting an improved competitive environment. Instead, we’re taking targeted, strategic action to drive out costs, reengineer the business through process enhancement and automation and advance our networking capabilities and performance.
We’ve made solid progress in scaling the emerging growth areas of our business -- such as IP and E-Services, which grew at a 9.7 percent rate in 2003 -- while also becoming the largest competitive local exchange carrier in America. Our Business Local Services grew by 28.4 percent in 2003, and we now have a total of 4.5 million access lines serving small and medium-sized businesses.
We’re also "changing the game" for consumers. AT&T established itself as a major provider of bundled residential services in 2003, moving beyond traditional voice long distance to include local, Internet, broadband, wireless and international calling packages and plans. As a result, we’re bringing services and people together with unprecedented levels of reliability and value. We’re already providing competitive local service to more than 4 million residential customers and, as of March 2004, we have expanded our Consumer Local Services presence to nearly every state in the country.
Also important is our commitment to improving the "customer experience" at AT&T. We’ve instilled a relentless company-wide focus on meeting customers’ needs, building long-term strategic partnerships and improving our customers’ businesses or enhancing their lives. We’ve backed up our pledge with an investment of more than ＄700 million in 2003 aiming at streamlining and automating processes and improving our customer-facing performance metrics. While further investment will follow, customers are today seeing the results through faster provisioning and cycle times, simplified contracting and improved billing and care. At the same time, we’ve made great strides in driving our own productivity, with a "revenue per employee" performance that now ranks as the highest by far among the major players in our industry.
We’ve also had great success in driving AT&T’s financial strength and flexibility, reducing our net debt by more than 30 percent in 2003 to ＄8.8 billion, which is among the lowest of the major players in our industry.