Word: ceos
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Last week the CEO proposed his most spectacular link-up yet: a plan to merge $70 billion Bell Atlantic (which serves roughly 40 million customers in 13 states) with GTE, a $52 billion company with some 21 million widely scattered customers. Earlier in the week AT&T had announced a multibillion-dollar joint venture with British Telecom. Driven by a violent reworking of the competitive and technological landscape, phone giants were embracing one another mostly out of mutual fear and defensiveness...
...first commandment of telecommunications: Thou shalt be huge. No phone company now has to invest billions in an expensive network. Instead it can just piggyback on other folks' networks, which have excess capacity to rent. Some upstarts are building networks of their own. Says Joseph Nacchio, CEO of Qwest, a telecom upstart based in Denver: "All the old reasons for scale are gone." Nacchio, who left the No. 3 slot at AT&T to run Qwest, compares the latest round of mergers to "an oligarchy buying a monopoly." The future, he predicts, will bring a more pluralistic, competitive system...
...they will be a nightmare for the mega-Bells, which must add new subscribers faster than they lose revenue to new competitors and pricing pressures. Some firms, like AT&T, hope to find lucre in international markets, where telephone demand is growing in the triple digits. Says AT&T CEO C. Michael Armstrong: "Societies are attempting to rise in the economic order, and multinationals are reaching out to serve them...
Blockbuster's troubles were destroying the synergistic dreams of its parent, media giant Viacom (1997 sales: $13.2 billion), owner of Paramount Pictures, Nickelodeon and MTV. Viacom CEO Sumner Redstone bought Blockbuster in 1994 from billionaire Wayne Huizenga for $8 billion, figuring that the retail stores would be a natural outlet for Viacom's films and music. But by mid-1997, with Viacom's stock stuck to the floor, Redstone had to implement drastic measures, including a $323 million charge at Blockbuster. The charge reflected an unsuccessful attempt to expand Blockbuster's sales by emphasizing music, candy and comics and moving...
...listener of the singer's name, the record label and where the album can be bought. Though the label does not pay for airplay, the commercials (which run only when the song is played) are an obvious incentive for the station to play the records more often. Capitol Nashville CEO Pat Quigley says he's so pleased with the results that he intends to expand his campaign to 100 markets...