KPN-beleggers, opgelet. Dit meldt iemand mij net. Passages uit de conference call van AT&T gisteren. Of het bedrijf nog belangstelling heeft om overnames in Europa te doen? Lees mee. Phil A. Cusick is een analist van JPMorgan Chase en Randall L. Stephenson is CEO van AT&T.
Zoals ik het lees denkt AT& T eerder aan samenwerkingsverbanden en partnerships dan aan keiharde overnames.Wellicht verklaart dit ook de forse daling van KPN vandaag. Anyway, goed voor telecom-liefhebbers om te lezen hoe Stephenson tegen de marktontwikkelingen aan kijkt.
Just one more thing! Overnames worden nooit aangekondigd en als ergens het speelveld snel verandert, is het wel tech en telecom. Het kan daarom maar zo dat AT&T of iemand anders ineens wel belangstelling voor KPN heeft. Hier de passages, de cruciale paasages heb ik vet gemaakt:
<Q - Phil A. Cusick>: Hey, guys, thanks. I guess two quick ones. First, Randall, you were quoted recently as - I don't know if this is right or not, but saying that international or European acquisitions may be inevitable to continue growth. Can you address that for us? And then, second, for John, blowing through this buyback by mid-year, that's great. What do you think about the potential to reauthorize, and how does the board think about that so far? Thank you.
<A - Randall L. Stephenson>: Yeah, sure, Phil. As it relates to international, I was asked about consolidation, and I said some level of consolidation was inevitable. And obviously we don't comment on M&A rumors. But here's what I'd ask you to think about. As you consider what's happened in the last five years in the U.S., it has been impressive what's transpired in the mobile Internet revolution, and the U.S. has been outpacing the rest of the globe fairly considerably.
And I think most people expect the rest of the world will catch up, and so the question you have to ask is, are there opportunities for us to participate in that growth outside the U.S. And we look at this from a lot of different ways. As more and more people around the world begin to deploy LTE, there are probably some opportunities to create some unique roaming arrangements, where we can roam on each other's networks at different cost structures, which may change that dynamic somewhat.
The opportunities to partner, like you've seen us partnering in China, our China Telecom deal that we did, and you'll probably see those kind of deals more and more in the mobility side. Do you invest at the infrastructure level is a big question. And there's really another aspect to it, and that is can you participate in this growth outside the U.S. at the application level, and this year's going to be very instructive in that regard to us, because services like Digital Life, which is really - it's an over-the-top application for home security and monitoring and so forth, and is it possible to carry those platforms outside the U.S.
We are already licensing that platform to companies in Europe, and so can those platforms be extended in an over-the-top model outside the U.S.? So as we kind of look at this, we do believe the U.S. experience will be replicated outside the U.S., and we're just trying to decide how is it we would participate in that, and they're a lot of avenues for that.
<Q - Phil A. Cusick>: So it sounds like acquiring something is less on your mind than other opportunities.
<A - Randall L. Stephenson>: There's just a lot of different ways to think about it, and that's all I'm trying to characterize here, Phil. There's a lot of options.