I saw earlier this year that Mint Mobile cell phone company is being taken over by AT&T and yesterday I got a notice that my trac phone company is being taken over by Verizon.
I have to opt out of Verizon's use of my personal data for their purpose of sending my data to all of its affiliates to send my marketing data to other outfits.
Will our future use of cell phones be dictated by two vast giants? There may be a third contender, Walmart, I don’t know one way or another.
Verizon has acquired 37 smaller cell phone companies in the last few years. I imagine AT&T has done the same or more. Does anyone remember Alltel, or Sprint? They were gobbled up. It seems to me that cell phone companies are wanting to become like the banking industry, always wanting to consolidate into ever larger conglomerates.
Wall Street brokerages have dabbled in this same game earlier.
It is never a good thing when competition is slowly eradicated. We pay more for our services and get less in return. We are now on a slippery slope and may even be in a freefall that we don’t yet know about.
As usual, I may be full of beans and wrong in my thinking. I have been there before.
Yes, this is true and if you want stocks, you will note neither company is a good buy.
ReplyDeleteI would imagine that cell phone companies are both capital and labor intensive. They have to have a huge number of workers to build, repair and maintain towers, plus maintain stores for sales people to hawk their phones and people to answer phones at their call centers.
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