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Technology Stocks : AUTOHOME, Inc -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Nicholas Thompson who wrote (7620)	4/11/1999 1:58:00 AM
From: Ted Schnur	Respond to of 29970

I can understand some of the reasons behind the speculation that AT&T would sell WorldNet to ATHM. It always seemed to me somewhat strange that AT&T every planed to sell WorldNet, especially after the IBM Internet deal. Now here is some new data. There is an article in the April 26th edition of Fortune Magazine titled "Mike Armstrong's AT&T: Will the Pieces Come Together?" In that article, there is a section that talks about why Armstrong abandoned that plan to have AT&T's consumer business unit (under AT&T president Zeglis) tracked with separately traded class of AT&T shares (tracking stock). Then the following caught my eye: The new arrangement leaves Armstrong with a potentially risky divide. Rather than reporting to the same person, the consumer unit is split in two, with Hindery running the broadband-services group--cable TV, local telephone, and high-speed Internet services--and Zeglis overseeing consumer long-distance, wireless, and low-speed Internet service. Hindery and Zeglis both will market the whole range of services to AT&T's residential customers--Hindery from the vantage of the local operator who knows where to dig up a street without severing the power lines, Zeglis ("the bundling king," Armstrong calls him) as the national telemarketer who will solicit customers from afar. If Hindery signs up a cable customer for long-distance service, he will have to buy minutes from Zeglis. If Zeglis signs up a long-distance customer for cable service by offering two free pay-per-view movies a month for a year, the two honchos will have to sit down and hash out who pays for that discount. Given this "new arrangement" in AT&T's management organization (Seglis and Hindery both report to Armstrong), I can't see why Ziglis would agree to selling WordNet, or why Armstrong would set up this type of management structure if his intent was to sell WordNet to ATHM. BTW, there is nothing in the article about ATHM? The entire article is available at newsstands everywhere. Or you can go directly to: pathfinder.com Ted