Ireland? Man, don't these guys ever take a day off? Seriously, i just came home from a great day at the beach and can't find anything anything to confirm MileHigh's post.
The only place i find Global Crossing an Ireland mentioned is in the Barron's article (and there is no mention of any deal):
Q: It's time to talk about stocks. Oscar, what do you like?
Castro: One of our best recommendations is an Irish company called Esat Telecom Group. It's the strong No. 2 provider of telecom services to businesses in Ireland, which is the only place it operates. The Irish economy is growing very strongly, probably 6%-7% in 1999, and Esat is a beneficiary of corporate immigration. Services and industries are moving into Ireland, and it's amazing to see how many Irish-Americans are coming home. There are three aspects to the Esat story. One is strong economic growth. Next is Esat's position as the second player in the marketplace. Thirdly, Ireland is such a small domestic market that competition won't get any worse than it is now. Esat still is unprofitable. It's investing in developing its infrastructure, new products and services and expanding its customer base. It already offers voice, data and Internet services. We see good potential in the stock. Our target for its American depositary shares, recently $41, is $59.
Anyway, i'm with Raymond: buy, build, partner do whateva it and do it right now! Erin go bragh.
More from the Barron's article:
Over the course of the next three or four years, there will be a stratified structure within this industry on a global basis. There will be four, five, six, maybe seven mega-carriers, not 20. These companies will have all aspects of the value chain covered, from the network to the bandwidth to the applications to distribution to connectivity. They will want to have scale and scope of facilities on a global basis. They will want ubiquity of distribution. They will want product sets and applications. If there is a killer application in global telecom, it's the ability to offer cross-border networking, data and Internet protocol solutions, to business customers.
In other words, you want to take a fat pipe out of a building in New York City and connect it to fat pipes in buildings around the world, on your own network. If you look at the calculus of value creation in telecom, it will be driven by those companies that can provide bandwidth-centric services. |
