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Cingular's people used the clock to snatch AT&T Wireless from the jaws of Vodafone as this article in today's NYTimes Cingular's $41 Billion Offer Wins Bidding for AT&T Wireless describes. They literally made a take-it-or-leave-it offer in the middle of the night in North America, while the Vodafone team slept in London. [Question: What kind of M&A team doing a $35B deal doesn't have feet on the ground? ed.] Well, whatever will be . . .
As almost everyone with a passing interest has been saying for a year or more, it was overdue. Consolidation was inevitable. Here's a snip from the NYTimes piece:
The sale to Cingular is the first sign of long promised consolidation in an industry that has suffered from overcrowding. While the deal will likely help the profitability of industry -- Cingular estimates the combination will save them as much as $15 billion -- it may mean higher prices for consumers in the long term and thousands of layoffs of overlapping positions at both AT&T Wireless and Cingular.Well, we'll see what happens. With two monsters (Verisign at 24% and Cingular -- with AT&T -- at 30% market share) and a bunch of also-rans (Sprint 10%; T-Mobile 9%; Nextel 8%), probably less price cutting and deal offering. But let's none of us hold our breath waiting for better customer care or service quality. And, large mergers/acquisitions have historically tended to dissipated value before they create any.Still, the intensity of the ultra competitive landscape has been a mixed blessing for consumers. They have gotten lower prices and rich incentives for signing up with a wireless provider. But the effort by competitors to rapidly deploy their networks to fulfill the demand has often led to poor service quality and shoddy customer care.