It was announced today that CenturyTel will buy Qwest Communications, subject to shareholder and regulatory approval, for $10.6 billion, or $6.02 per share, in an all stock deal. If you’ll recall, way back in June I recommended Qwest as a company with an ample free cash flow in excess of its reported earnings. At the […]
Sorry for the silly pun. United Online (UNTD) is a conglomerate of three online companies joined at the parent level. Their first, and oldest, company is a dial-up ISP that was created when Juno and NetZero merged. Their second segment is made of Classmates Online and Mypoints.com, which is an Internet marketing loyalty service. Their […]
Some of my more loyal reader(s) will recall that one of the very first stocks I suggested on our site was Qwest, on the grounds that it had on the order of $750 million in depreciation expenses that was not being made up for with additional capital expenditures. Considering that the firm has a P/E […]
Windstream has announced their fourth acquisition since they started, this time for Iowa Telecommunications Services for 1.1 billion, consisting of 26.5 million shares of stock, $260 million in cash, and assuming $600 million of debt. The target firm has 256,000 access lines, 95,000 high speed Internet customers, and 26,000 digital TV customers, which the article […]
Windstream (WIN) has just announced that they are acquiring yet another phone company, NuVox, for 280 million in cash, about 180 million in stock, and 180 million in assumed debt, total 640 million. NuVox focuses specifically on business, which makes it a desirable fit with Windstream’s plan to offset landline loss with high revenue customers. […]
Well, it’s official: Fairpoint has filed for bankruptcy. As Moyer’s Distressed Debt Investing states, the actual filing of a Chapter 11 is never a surprise. Although it may seem curious that its creditors reduced the size of their claim from 2.7 billion to 1 billion, the reality is that the creditors are going to become […]
Those of you who watch Jim Cramer, of whom Seth Klarman said that he is a symptom of everything that is wrong with the financial world nowadays, will recall that last week he expressed approval of the safety of Windstream’s dividend. He also mentioned Fairpoint Communications (FRP), after qualifying his remarks with the fact that […]
Every financial panic needs a good person to blame. This one can be blamed on securitizers and financial derivatives engineers; the one before on deluded dot-com investors, the one before (the junk bond collapse) on frenzied, ill-advised mergers, and the one before that (the Latin American debt crisis) on the oil crisis. I’ve skipped the […]
A great deal of analysis is devoted to ferreting out a company’s true earnings. It may be necessary, for example, to adjust asset impairment costs if the reality is not that the assets suddenly became impaired but that the company overpaid for them to begin with. Benjamin Graham’s Security Analysis devoted a significant number of […]