San Antonio – SBC Communications Inc. will probably change its name to AT&T Corp. once the combination of the two companies is complete, people familiar with the matter said.
The AT&T brand is likely to be chosen because it is recognized globally, said the people, who declined to be identified. Executives at San Antonio- based SBC have been considering the change since the company in January agreed to buy AT&T for $16 billion.
A decision to become AT&T would keep alive a name that is synonymous with telephone service in the United States. Bedminster, N.J.-based AT&T grew from Alexander Graham Bell’s 1877 startup into a company with 1 million employees before being broken up.
SBC chief executive Edward Whitacre said in January that while AT&T is one of the “premier brands,” he hadn’t made up his mind on a name.
“The AT&T brand is much better known than SBC worldwide,” Whitacre said in an April interview.
Whitacre said he would make a decision in “late summer.”
SBC spokesman Selim Bingol said a decision on a name hasn’t been made.
He wouldn’t comment further. The purchase is scheduled to close by the end of the year.
Shares of SBC, formerly Southwestern Bell Corp., up 1.3 percent since the Jan. 31 acquisition announcement, rose 27 cents to $24.08 in New York Stock Exchange composite trading. AT&T shares rose 19 cents to $19.68.
SBC has grown from the smallest of seven local-phone providers spun off in the 1984 breakup of AT&T to become a company with more than 50 million local-calling customers.
Taking on a globally recognized brand would reflect SBC’s ambitions to become a company that can offer telecommunications services to customers worldwide.
The name also brings some baggage. AT&T’s market value, which peaked at about $180 billion in 1999, has fallen to about $15.7 billion as revenue plunged and it sold wireless and cable-television businesses. The stock had been a member of the Dow Jones industrial average since 1916 before being dropped last year. SBC’s market capitalization has grown to about $80 billion, and the stock is a member of the Dow average.
After the transaction is completed, SBC will become the largest U.S. phone company by sales and gain access to the biggest long-distance phone network and business customers such as Lockheed Martin Corp.
Some had viewed the SBC purchase as marking the end of the 130-year-old company that had brought phones into American homes.
Whitacre, 63, head of SBC for more than 15 years, got his start stringing telephone wire as a facility engineer in 1963 for the American Telephone & Telegraph monopoly in Lubbock, Texas.
“I worked for AT&T at one time early in my career, so I’m partial to that name,” Whitacre said. “But I’m very partial to SBC, of course, because I’ve been here while we built this thing.”
