AT&T buys Bellsouth and Cingular

December 30th, 2006 by Arjan Olsder Posted in Companies & M&A | No Comments »

AT&T announced the acquisition of Bellsouth and Cingular in the US. The new combination will have a value of up to $ 220 billion and will be the biggest in the market. AT&T announced on a mini-site the transformation of both Bellsouth and Cingular to the AT&T brand. Cingular will be re-branded early 2007 and AT&T hopes to have both networks connected before that time. This acquisition looks a lot like the acquisition of Telfort by KPN in The Netherlands earlier this year. However except for joining the networks, KPN left Telfort mostly the way it is, making it purely an acquisition to stabilize it’s market possition.