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Technology Stocks : Lucent Technologies (LU) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: elmatador who wrote (19556)	3/19/2002 6:50:00 PM
From: John Soileau	Respond to of 21876

<<Why they didn't accept ALA's offer?>> Hey elmatador, a couple of points: 1. Remember, it wasn't a cashout. From the article: <<Alcatel's acquisition of Lucent for roughly $32 billion (37.25 billion euros) in stock by Wednesday>> <<Alcatel's market capitalization is just over $34.5 billion based on Friday's close of 31.95 euros per share.>> Had the ALL STOCK transaction gone through, the ALA shares swapped for LU then would today be worth only about 16 billion. Not a huge premium over today's LU market cap, and if the deal had gone through, the post-merger ALA shares could certainly have done even worse. Sure, nimble trading could have allowed a profit if the deal had gone through; but the same has been true of LU since then as well. 2. Not sure that cobbling these two rhinos together at the hip and ankle, at that time, would have created a gazelle. More likely a schizoid manatee! Merger is a huge drain on management attention-- quite difficult during a good market, very difficult during this market, and supremely difficult when cultures and languages also have to merge (see the recent Fortune article on Daimler). It could have been a case of merge, fail, and die. Guess we won't ever know, but that possibility had me ready to vote against the merger. 3. We have the benefit of hindsight now. Amazing how it makes prior decisions susceptible to wonderful reanalysis and correction. Wish I knew how to have the future's hindsight while still in realtime. That would be money! John