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Technology Stocks : Qwest Communications (Q) (formerly QWST) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: xristy who wrote (4534)	7/12/1999 1:05:00 AM
From: George Sepetjian	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 6846

Today's NY Times (7/12/99) Long piece on all the players. Here's a snippet. At Qwest, the shift in focus toward the top of the food chain has happened in fast-forward, and some investors have found it unsettling. When the company first offered shares to the public in 1997, it was seen on Wall Street as a bandwidth play. Investors expected Qwest to concentrate on using the latest technology to build a long-distance network with more, and cheaper, capacity than those of companies like AT&T or MCI, letting the upstart take market share away from slower, less-advanced competitors. Over the last year, though, Qwest has repositioned itself as -- surprise! -- a provider of advanced communications services for end users. This year alone, Qwest has announced partnerships with companies including KPMG, BellSouth, Siebel Systems, SAP America, Hewlett-Packard, Oracle and Automatic Data Processing's Brokerage Services unit to develop high-margin applications like software for sales forces, aimed at various market segments//cut for space. And now, Qwest is making an unsolicited run at acquiring Frontier, a long-distance company that also owns Globalcenter, one of the biggest Web-hosting concerns, and U S West, the regional Bell company based in Denver. U S West is the slowest-growing Bell, but it still has millions of customers, whom Qwest needs for the new services it is developing. Qwest is trying to wrench Frontier and U S West from the grasp of another erstwhile bandwidth play, Global Crossing. While both Qwest and Global Crossing have made cases for why their deals make sense, their sudden transformations have left some investors scratching their heads.