There’s a lot going on in the telecommunications industry at the moment. There are stories of informal offers being made by Verizon to acquire MCI, this to counter Qwest’s offer to acquire the company as well. It’s interesting to note that, if the numbers can be believed, neither party is falling over themselves to offer a premium far beyond the approximate $6 billion market cap for MCI. Verizon is certainly the stronger of the two suitors, and has the added benefit of not having faced their own criminal investigations for their accounting practices. After the WorldCom debacle, I would think the executives at MCI would look warily at Qwest, who have had their own accounting practices called into question.
In a Wall Street Journal on-line article today on all the deal-making there’s a throw-away comment that yesterday AT&T announced that they’ll walk away from their wireless resale deal with Sprint. A quick look around the web doesn’t give me any information that confirms that, but there you go. Should we suspect AT&T will start over again with a Cingular resale deal? I still don’t think this is a very good idea for AT&T.
1 response so far ↓
Your Insatiable One // 15 February 2005 at 01:59 |
The funny thing is that MCI CEO Mike Capellas formerly headed up Compaq, where he promised to turn things around in 100 days. His solution ended up being merging Compaq with HP. When he took over the helm at MCI ne Worldcom, a lot of people joked that his turnaround plan would be to sell the company off to someone else. Guess sometimes humor is spot on.