Mergers and Acquistions: October 2007 Archives
Alltel announced that the Federal Communications Commission has approved the company’s merger with TPG Capital and GS Capital Partners (GSCP).
Alltel expects the merger to close before Thanksgiving Day, Nov. 22. At close, Alltel shareholders will receive $71.50 per share in cash.
Alltel operates America’s largest wireless network, which delivers voice and advanced data services nationwide to more than 12 million customers. Headquartered in Little Rock, Ark., Alltel is a Forbes 500 company with annual revenues of nearly $8 billion.
Motricity, a leading provider of mobile content services and solutions, today announced the signing of a definitive agreement to acquire the mobile services business unit of InfoSpace, Inc., a leading developer of mobile technologies and infrastructure services, for approximately $135 million in cash.
The acquisition expands Motricity's customer base to include 11 of the top 13 carriers in North America including AT&T, Verizon Wireless, Sprint, T-Mobile, Bell Mobility, Tracfone and Alltel.
Sanyo is in the process of selling its mobile phone business unit to Kyocera. Kyocera has been granted priority negotiation rights. No price has been set yet, however, the Nikkei reported Kyocera offered ¥70 billion ($597 million).
Google is acquiring Finnish social mobile microblogging service, Jaiku. manager at Google said “We’re excited to announce that
we’ve acquired Jaiku, a company
that’s been hard at work developing useful and innovative applications
for staying in touch with the people you care about most — regardless
of whether you’re at a computer or on a mobile phone.”
Jaiku has been compared to industry leader Twitter, where friends
always know what their friends are doing via mini mobile posts.
Analysts are saying that this is a yet another move by Google to be the
master of all media including IM, mobile Web and microblogging.
AT&T Inc.announced its board of directors has approved an agreement to purchase spectrum licenses covering 196 million people in the 700 MHz frequency band from Aloha Partners, L.P., a Delaware limited partnership.
The transaction enhances AT&T’s spectrum position by adding 12 MHz of spectrum covering 196 million people in 281 markets. The spectrum covers many major metropolitan areas, including 72 of the top 100 and all of the top 10 markets in the United States.
Industry insiders think that this purchase will mean more bandwidth for video and data applications. According to the Wall Street Journal “The 700-megahertz block of airwaves is especially valuable because signals can travel long distances and more easily penetrate walls and other obstacles. Networks that operate in the 700-megahertz range are also less expensive to build than in other portions of the spectrum.”
U.S. mobile marketing company Air2Web and European mobile marketing services provider Mindmatics AG announced their merger
Air2Web and MindMatics claim the merger will result in "the world's largest, independent, pure-play mobile marketing agency."
Frost & Sullivan estimates the value of worldwide mobile marketing
and advertising to reach $4.2 billion in 2008, and $12.7 billion by
2011.
Nokia and
NAVTEQ today announced that Nokia will acquire NAVTEQ, aChicago-based digitalmapping company that licenses content to
global positioning systems and Web sites."With NAVTEQ, Nokia will further strengthen its location based services(LBS) offering and bringtomarket the most innovative, context aware Nokia Internet services with accelerated time to market,"states Nokia's announcement.
GPS is important to mobile handsets The Gartner Group forecasts that GPS handsets will represent around 40% of sales in 2011, up from 13% in 2007.
Nokia has been offering more Internet devices and recently acquired mobile ad company EnPocket.
