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Thursday, October 19, 2006

Telephone - the New AT&T and "NTT"-

AT&T Inc. - not "AT&T" which is abbreviation of the preceding company, "AT&T" began trading on December 1, 2005.

Headquarters: San Antonio, Texas, USA
Industry: Telecommunications
Products: Telephone, Internet, Television

AT&T Inc. is the largest provider of both local and long distance telephone services, wireless service (Cingular), and DSL internet access in the United States. The current company was formed by SBC Communications' purchase of its former parent company, AT&T Corp. As a part of the merger, SBC shed its name and took on the iconic AT&T moniker and the T stock-trading symbol (for "telephone").

  1. January 31, 2005: SBC announced that it would purchase AT&T for more than $16 billion. The announcement came almost 8 years after SBC and AT&T called off their first merger talks and nearly a year after initial merger talks between AT&T and BellSouth fell apart.
  2. June 30, 2005: AT&T stockholders, meeting in Denver, approved the merger
  3. October 27, 2005: The U.S. Department of Justice (USDJ) cleared the merger.
  4. October 31, 2005: The Federal Communications Commission approved it.
  5. November 18, 2005: The merger was finalized.

SBC announced that the name of the merged company will be AT&T, Inc., and it adopted an updated logo. The merger is ironic in the fact that one of the "Baby Bells" grew to the strength to buy out "Ma Bell" AT&T. A further irony is that the government, which mandated the breakup of the original monopoly AT&T in the first place, gave the go-ahead to allow AT&T to reconstitute much of itself in this merger.
- from Wikipedia, AT&T

As you know, there are talks to merge with BellSouth from March 5, 2006. The acquisition of BellSouth has already received approval from the USDJ, and FCC is having the vote on November 3.
It'd been nine months from the announcement to receive approval from the USDJ to start the new AT&T. On the contrary, it seems the takeover of BellSouth Corp is processing considerably fast; it took seven months to the approval from the USDJ.

The reason why I trace AT&T every now and then is that I used to work at one of NTT's subsidiaries. The history of NTT is similar to AT&T's (of course we can find some difference though):

  1. NTT was a goverment-owned Japanese telecommunications company.
  2. It had a monopoly over IT services to Japan nationwide and was then privatized in 1985 to encourage competition in the telecom market.
  3. NTT then formed the holding company and several subsidiaries in 1999 so as not to be dogmatic.

The preceding AT&T split completely in 1984, and the new combined company forms a holding company, which is the same hierarchy as current NTT. I will still check the U.S. telecom industry such as the NOV 3, 2006!

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