Word: telecoms
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...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...
...this furious merging is the growth of competition from nontelephone companies. A decade ago, most Americans picked up their phones to hear a dial tone linking them to one of the Baby Bell companies. But in recent years that monopoly has slipped away. And in the eyes of traditional telecom bosses, the antidote is conglomeration, a kind of circle-the-wagons strategy they hope can hold off competition's inevitable charge. The approach has roots in an earlier boom time. In the 1920s the nation's railroad firms consolidated in a vain attempt to stave off competition from cars...
...enter the business. And on Wall Street, the big phone mergers are now regarded with skepticism (and some concern that Washington will intervene). Both GTE and Bell Atlantic stocks slipped last week. AT&T--which took a hit after announcing a merger with TCI--ticked up after the British Telecom deal...
...everyone is selling them these days, from Radio Shack to department stores. And it's a good time to buy. Mark Lowenstein, an analyst at the Yankee Group, says prices have come down 20% during the past year. "There's a real battle for shelf space," he says. Topp Telecom even began selling Uniden's TracFones through selected 7-Elevens this month. You can also find them at Eckerd's drugstores and Pilot gas stations. The TracFone is sort of a cellular "Saturday-night special": pony up $99 and walk away with a cheap but effective phone with 60 minutes...
...meals, they took it seriously," says Ahn, whose belt tightening has worked perhaps too effectively--he claims he lost 8 lbs. with all the extra running around on his last business trip. Other pleasurable business habits are also taking a pounding. Says Ryu Dae Hee, a Shinsegi Telecom manager: "It is no longer affordable to go drinking with leftovers from the travel budgets, and our business counterparts don't seem to expect treats anymore...