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AT&T Inc. says it will fire about 4,650 workers, trimming the managerial ranks in its fading home phone business after more than $100 billion in acquisitions.

The decision covers about 1.5 percent of the work force, San Antonio-based AT&T said Friday in a regulatory filing.

The dismissals at the largest U.S. phone company are in addition to the 10,000 announced with the $86 billion purchase of BellSouth Corp. in December 2006, spokesman Walt Sharp said.

Most of the reductions apply to the local phone business, Sharp said. That unit lost 1.6 million residential lines last year as customers switched to cable and wireless phone service.

AT&T has sought to reduce overlap in its operations since buying BellSouth and the former AT&T Corp., with plans to slash annual costs by about $7 billion by 2009.

"They’re going to have to continuously downsize that business," said Craig Moffett, an analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein in New York. "This isn’t the first and won’t be the last time." He expects the shares to perform in line with the rest of the market.

It’s unclear how many of the layoffs will be in St. Louis, where AT&T is one of the region’s biggest employers with about 10,000 people.

Sharp said the company would not break down cuts by location but did say that most of the layoffs are in its land-line division, which is focused in the 22 states formerly served by Southwestern Bell and Bell South, including Missouri and Illinois.

Workers at AT&T’s complex of office buildings downtown said they had been told of the layoffs but not told how many would be here creditreport. The company did not file a notice with state officials that is required when more than 50 people are laid off at once, said Mike Waltman, a spokesman for the Missouri Division of Workforce Development. But smaller layoffs over time may not require such a notice.

Many of the people who work at AT&T’s downtown headquarters work in either its Yellow Pages division, which is headquartered here, or an information technology unit. Neither were expected to see big cuts, Sharp said.

Nationwide, AT&T plans to book a pretax cost of about $374 million for the job cuts in the first quarter. Before the announcement, analysts on average predicted AT&T would report net income of $3.95 billion for the period. The phone company had about 310,000 employees as of Jan. 31.

The company is scheduled to report first-quarter earnings Tuesday. In the previous quarter, sales fell short of analysts’ estimates after some customers failed to pay their bills, hurt by slowing economic growth.

In trading Friday, shares of AT&T fell 6 cents to close at $37.51. The shares have dropped 9.7 percent this year, compared with a 16 percent decline in the Standard & Poor’s 500 telecommunication services index.

To slow phone customer losses, the company is spending $7 billion in five years to rewire parts of its network to offer faster Internet speeds and television service over its lines.

TIM LOGAN OF THE POST-DISPATCH CONTRIBUTED TO THIS REPORT.

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