EPS
join:2008-02-13
Hingham, MA
| reply to NOCMan
Re: Wow
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. |
