Big is beautiful

摘要

"There's a lot of reasons to do this," says Edward Whitacre, the boss of AT&T, of his company's $67 billion plan to acquire BellSouth, unveiled on March 5th. The deal will make AT&T, already the biggest telecoms firm in the world, even bigger, increasing its stockmarket value from around $110 billion to around $170 billion. It is just the latest in a series of acquisitions by the tireless Mr Whitacre. In 2005, as chief executive of sbc, he bought AT&T-the whole company adopted the AT&T name earlier this year. The logic of his latest and biggest deal rests, as he points out, on a combination of factors.