Job cuts planned after AT&T-BellSouth deal

“Over the last couple of years as we have operated Cingular and our Yellow Pages venture, it became clear that there was a lot of duplication that could be eliminated,” said Duane Ackerman, chief executive of BellSouth.

“This merger will allow us to move to a single brand for wireline, for wireless, for business and consumer, and that’s AT&T,” said Randall Stephenson, AT&T’s chief operating officer. “A single brand is much more cost efficient and far more effective.”

Under the terms of the deal, AT&T is paying 1.325 of its own shares for each BellSouth share. AT&T shares closed Monday down 97 cents, or 3.5 percent, at $27.02 on the New York Stock Exchange.

That put the value of the offer at $35.80 per BellSouth share. Those shares rose $3.04, or 9.7 percent, to close Monday at $34.50.

The narrow difference between AT&T’s offer and the market price for BellSouth shares indicated that investors believe the merger is almost certain to get through regulators.

AT&T plans to buy back stock worth at least $10 billion in the next two years, effectively paying for the premium given to BellSouth shareholders in cash, executives said.

David Kaut, a telecom regulatory analyst at the financial services firm Stifel Nicolaus & Co., said the merger would likely gain approval with modest conditions, such as the sell-off of business lines in overlapping territories.

One wild card, he said, may be Federal Communications Commission Robert McDowell, a Republican, who would take the open seat at the commission if approved by the Senate. McDowell is a lobbyist on behalf of the phone carriers that compete with the Bells and could be more open to their concerns.

“We don’t think he’s going to go completely off the reservation and try to block” the merger, said Kaut. “He would probably try to work out some conditions that allow the deal to happen but also address competitive concerns.”

Regulators are likely to buy the telephone companies’ argument that other technologies will provide sufficient competition, Merrill Lynch analyst David Janazzo wrote in a research report.

Telephone companies are losing a few percent of their phone customers every year to cable, Internet and wireless telephony.

Janazzo also noted that the deal would not change the competitive landscape among cellular carriers, because Cingular is already an AT&T-BellSouth joint venture.

Justice Department officials said the proposed purchase would be reviewed by antitrust regulators, but offered no assessment of whether it was likely to generate objections.

The merger also needs approval from state regulators.

If either company calls off the merger, it may have to pay the other company $1.7 billion, according to a regulatory filing by AT&T on Monday.

The deal would substantially expand the reach of AT&T, already the country’s largest telecommunications company by the number of customers served. BellSouth is the dominant local telephone provider in the Southeast.

The merged company would have 70 million local-line phone customers, 54.1 million wireless subscribers and nearly 10 million broadband subscribers in the 22 states where they now operate.

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