“Hero” may not be a term that major internet service providers, pay TV and other telecommunications operators are often used to having attached to them. They’re probably more familiar with every outage or customer service stumble resulting in other colorful four-letter terms getting strewn across the web and social media very quickly.
However, a new report from the Progressive Policy Institute, “U.S. Investment Heroes of 2016: Fighting Short-termism” that ranks a top 25 of nonfinancial American companies by their capital spending in the United States actually has some familiar names in the communications space, including Comcast, Time Warner Cable, AT&T and Verizon.
In total, the top 25 American companies on the list invested an estimated $176.9 billion in the U.S. in 2015, a 2.9 percent increase from 2014. On a bad note, this is a substantially smaller increase than the 12.7 percent jump the index saw in 2014 over 2013.
Authored by PPI Economist Michelle Di Ionno and Chief Economic Strategist Michael Mandel, the report provides an estimate of domestic capital spending by major U.S. companies and identifies companies “resisting short-termism and making long-term investments in infrastructure, buildings, equipment and software.” PPI reportedly dubs these companies “Investment Heroes” because their capital spending is said to be helping to raise productivity and wages across the country.
Similar to the results reported last year by PPI, the top “Investor Heroes” by industry were said to be cable and telecom providers, followed by energy production companies, technology and Internet companies and energy distribution companies. These four categories comprised 18 out of the 25 companies on the list, and accounted for nearly 80 percent of the total investment, according to PPI.
