On March 3 last year, I wrote in my column: "The joke in the US telecoms market is that the few surviving phone companies are going to merge and change their name to Ma Bell. Following three big takeovers in the past two months, we may not be that far away."
AT&T -- "Ma Bell" -- was broken up by the US government in 1984, and last year, the struggling remnant eventually sold off to SBC for only $16 billion. But now SBC has changed its name to AT&T and is back on the take-over trail, buyiing Bell South, the last surviving "Baby Bell", for stock worth $67 billion.
"A combined AT&T-BellSouth would have $130 billion in sales and serve residential customers in 22 states," says The New York Times.
SBC has bougtht four phone companies in the past decade -- Pacific Telesis ((Pacific Bell and Nevada Bell), Southern New England Telecommunications (SNET), Ameritech and AT&T -- in the process of reassembling most of the AT&T that the anti-trust department destroyed. But it hasn't been a complete waste of time. Just think of all those hundreds of billions of dollars spent on corporate take-overs.....
