Tuesday, June 05, 2007

Why Carlos Helim Selu is in telecom





CrossingWallStreet.com: Avaya To Be Taken Private

Another stock is leaving the public market. This time, it’s Avaya (AV), which is one of the spin-offs of the spin-offs of AT&T.

It’s been 25 years since Judge Greene ordered AT&T to be broken up, and the pieces are now all over the place. One of the rules of the breakup order is that the new companies had to have worse and worse sounding names. This started with Nynex and continued through with Lucent, Avaya and Agere.

In 2000, Avaya was spun-off from Lucent which isn’t even Lucent anymore, it’s Alcatel-Lucent (ALU). Although I doubt the hyphen will stay around much longer. In 1996, AT&T spun-off Lucent. I remember I sold my shares almost immediately and the stock shot up from there.