COVID 19 and Its Impact on the Technology Sector
April 3, 2025
In the past few years, technology companies have been driving the boom in the financial markets. The FAANG companies (Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, and Google) have seen their valuations increase by leaps and bounds. However, COVID-19 is causing a worldwide stock market collapse. It would be fair to say that the pandemic is not affecting…
Credit rating industries are part of a closely held industry. For years, this has worked in favor of these agencies since they have to face less competition. However, these agencies are also the first ones to get blamed after every financial crisis. It is a known fact that no one can really predict a market…
The American politics is heating up in anticipation of the 2020 Presidential Election. Democrats are unveiling what appears to be a populist socialistic agenda. Amongst the Democrats, Bernie Sanders, in particular, is hell-bent on enacting policies which can be considered to be socialist. Bernie Sanders has found an ally in Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez as she too…
AT&T is one of the biggest phone companies in the world. In fact, this was the company that first started building telephones. On the other hand, Time Warner is a giant in the media space. It owns major media channels like HBO and CNN. Each of these companies is gigantic in their own right. This means that a merger of these two companies would create a corporate giant. This is why such a merger was being blocked by many people. The American justice department filed an anti-trust lawsuit against this merger. Also, the American President, i.e., Donald Trump himself was opposed to the deal. He was asked about his opinions on this deal when he was a Presidential candidate. He categorically mentioned that if this deal went through, it would end up concentrating a lot of power in the hands of very few people.
Hence it would be safe to say that the public opinion was opposed to this mega-deal. However, AT&T and Time Warner justified this merger stating that it was inevitable that they merge to form a single company if they have to deal with companies like Netflix and Google. As a result, a tightly contested lawsuit was fought between the justice department and these mega-corporations. The final result is that the court has given its go-ahead to this merger. The justice department has vowed to continue its fight. However, for now, they could not stop the $109 billion mergers between these two companies.
In this article, we will have a look at some of the common objections that were raised against this merger.
Also, this merger is being financed by using large amounts of debt. The problem with leveraged buyouts is that the buyers do not seem to have a long time range. This means that they are in for making a quick buck and have a time frame of three to five years. A lot of strategic investments dont start making money in such a short span of time. This makes the investors panic-stricken and their sudden frantic decisions sometimes end up causing irreversible loss to the underlying corporation.
To sum it up, the odds are stacked against the Time Warner-AT&T deal. Odds are that this deal will end up causing severe damage to at least some of the stakeholders.
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