Leadership Profile: Maggie Wilderotter (Part 11)

Sunday, April 1, 2007 | 2 comments

The rural telecommunications market has over 1,500 telecommunications companies, many of them owned privately. Major telecoms such as AT&T and Verizon also own some rural markets, while others are private companies. Here we explore the possibilities of consolidating this market, and the strategies of the larger players.

SM: Sounds like the perfect market to consolidate! MW: Exactly. It is definitely a fragmented market place, and the majority of those companies are private companies. They are family owned companies, so the data and information about what they do is not readily available in the public market.

SM: Is consolidation something you would consider doing? MW: We just did a $1.2 billion acquisition of the 11th largest company, called Commonwealth Telephone, which we closed last Thursday. It has 450,000 in rural PN. We are participating in the roll up, and we will be situational about opportunities as they come up. You should also keep in mind that the two largest rural players in the US today are Verizon and AT&T. In addition to their urban market presence, they have many, many rural properties in the US.

SM: They will also be acquiring and consolidating? MW: Verizon actually just sold their North East rural to a company called Fair Point. I think Verizon is making some strategic decisions on how they deploy their capital, building out their 100MB network to the customers’ homes requires a fair amount of capital in their network structure. What they are looking at is where they can actually take their capabilities, what they can afford to do. In some cases they will probably sell lines that they won’t look to upgrade, and those would be opportunities for our company and others in our space to buy additional lines.

This segment is part 11 in a 14 part series Segment 12 →
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