patcat88
join:2002-04-05
Jamaica, NY | reply to NOCMan
Re: Wow
Vodafone owns 49%, not majority. Verizon will never sell its quadruple play baby. |
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EPS
join:2008-02-13
Hingham, MA
| reply to NOCMan
Vodafone has tried to get control, but Verizon won't give it up. There was a recent revolt by Vodafone's shareholders who actually want to ditch VZW altogether. Though it looks good on paper, in the past few years VZW has actually spent its profits on paying down its debt and not as dividends to the company's owners- no money going to VZ or VOD.
Vodafone's president recently said they expect VZW to start paying dividends again soon, since they paid off the vast majority of their pre-700MHz debt. However, with the 700MHz auction and now this acquisition, they'll have a lot of debt again... I think this may finally cause VOD to take action.
Note that while on paper VOD is a much larger company than VZ, they'd probably run into a lot of trouble trying to buy-out VZ (as has been rumored, and then sell off VZ landline to some mysterious FiOS-killing private equity firm) due to trouble in the credit markets, and Vodafone's own reputation with bad acquisitions (see Mannesmann)- they posted the largest loss in British corporate history in 2007.
Now, this doesn't necessarily mean that VZW becomes 100% VZ- the Vodafone shareholders I mentioned earlier actually wanted to spin off the 45% of VZW to the company's shareholders, which would essentially turn VZW into a publicly traded company, albeit one controlled by another publicly traded company. |
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NOCMan
Verizon Fios User
Premium
join:2004-09-30
Flower Mound, TX
| reply to antonio010
I am not surprised. Verizon and AT&T face the real possibility that T-Mobile would buy Sprint thus creating the the new largest cellular carrier with Verizon and AT&T being ranked 2 & 3 respectively.
This would ensure Verizon maintains the top spot. Still Verizon has serious issues with their phone lineup. They've been in denial about the iPhone since it has come out and refuse to carry the Nokia N95 CDMA version which is a good technical competitor to the iPhone. With the new software and dev kit Verizon and other carriers will be faced with teh hard decision on what to do. Verizon's open phone initiative does not provide any of the features the iPhone/iTunes and it's soon business features.
Having just won the C block I'm trying to fathom how they have 27 billion to just purchase this company. I would more expect that Vodaphone would buyout Verizon Wireless outright since the valuation of the dollar makes them a bargain compared to 3 years ago when the rumors reached their peak.
Of course Verizon Landline would die a slow death of that were to happen without Verizon Wireless supplementing their lack of income. Perhaps Vodaphone may consider gaining the controlling stake and allow the merger to happen with Alltel which would give them the largest global LTE footprint of any of the wireless carriers. They would be in a great situation go get concessions from Apple to allow them access to the other 1/3 of the US Market. That is something that Apple needs badly to accelerate their US sales numbers. |
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