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...past few months, Canada's telecom industry has been a cautionary tale. It's now increasingly likely that Nortel Networks Corp., the biggest maker of telephone equipment on the continent, will emerge from bankruptcy stripped of many of its most valuable assets along with its ambitions to be a world beater. Meanwhile, Montreal-based BCE Inc., parent of the country's biggest telco, Bell Canada, has continued its slide since a record $42.1 billion deal to privatize the company was abruptly killed in the final weeks...
...hindsight, the attempted takeover of BCE--the all-time biggest leveraged buyout in corporate history, led by the Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan, with backing from U.S. investors including Providence Equity Partners and Merrill Lynch Global Private Equity--was doomed from the moment it was signed in 2007. Less than two months later, global equity markets began to wobble, and credit got scarce. BCE's value sank from the take-out price of 34.62 a share to 16.85 on an auditor's report that debt from the proposed LBO would render the company insolvent. (Shares of BCE, with annual revenues...
...including its ousted American CEO, Patricia Russo, in what has turned into a restructuring and cultural nightmare. "There are no bronze medals in the telecom-equipment market," says analyst Duncan Stewart of Toronto-based DSAM Consulting. He says Silicon Valley's Cisco Systems and Sweden's Ericsson have the biggest market share, fattest margins and most cash to see them through this downturn...
...even telecom service and equipment suppliers that are prospering have reason to be worried, knowing they are in the crosshairs of free voice providers that want to render the industry as they know it obsolete. The biggest threat to the old order is probably Skype Ltd. of Luxembourg, which has attracted more than 405 million customers since it launched software in 2003 that allows free long-distance calls over the Internet. eBay paid $2.6 billion for Skype four years ago because it believed the free voice operator would mesh well with its auction business. It didn't. Now eBay...
Time-shares allow buyers to lock in the cost of future vacations, which makes them appealing to budget-minded travelers, and they're a less expensive alternative to buying a second home. Las Vegas, Hawaii and Orlando, Fla., have seen the biggest buildup in inventory and are therefore the places most susceptible to discounting...