Fantasy Telco League – Building Dream Service Providers

M. Halama

Summary Bullets:

• Be ready to exploit a round of telecom industry consolidation
• Potential for merging telco, ITSP, OTT and media assets and abilities

Telecom operator mergers and acquisitions have been sparse during the current economic downturn, though there have been some interesting ones, e.g., Verizon buying Terremark and CloudSwitch, NTT buying Dimension Data, Level 3 acquiring Global Crossing, and CenturyLink buying Savvis and Qwest. The lack of more merger and acquisition activity is surprising given the depressed state of some telco and ITSPs’ share prices. Now in 2012 there have been two attempts to acquire Cable & Wireless, from Vodafone and Tata Communications. Vodafone remains in the running with a GBP 1 billion bid. More recently Carlos Slim of America Movil in Mexico offered US$3.8 million to up his stake (to 28%, from under 5%) in Netherlands-based KPN. In keeping with speculation that expansion in Europe is of interest, Slim is also reported to be ‘eyeing’ Telekom Austria.