Thread regarding Verizon Communications Inc. layoffs

Some folks have been playing with chat gpt lol

I think I need another cup of coffee to take this all in! Here's my take:

This proposed three phase plan appears to be from a slick for profit investment firm (Apollo) looking to convince Verizon leadership to split into different VeriCo's to "unlock" shareholder value.

Other companies such as IBM and AT&T have pursued similar corporate structural changes for the promise of similarly argued economic benefit and with varying resulting degrees of success.

Corporate boards are always challenged with how to grow their companies underlying balance sheet value hence continuous merger, acquisition and divestiture activity.

Largely forgotten, was AT&T's Trivesture back in 1995 (30 years ago) wherby it willingly chose to split itself up into three separate publicly traded companies. This corporate restructuring aimed to allow each new entity to focus on its specific market opportunities without internal competition.

1. AT&T Communications: Focused on long-distance services and telecommunications.
2. NCR Corporation: Concentrated on transaction-intensive computing and technology.
3. Lucent Technologies: Specialized in telecommunications equipment and systems.

The long term result of this corporate breakup was disastrous for each of the three new entities as AT&T and Lucent are long since defunct having been acquired by other corporations, while NCR itself has since split into two entities which struggle financially to this day. Shareholder returns were boosted at first, but have been horrendous over this following period when tracking the resulting portfolio that was created by the AT&T Trivestiture.

Such a corporate breakup would run entirely counter to Verizon's historical corporate strategy of pursuing growth through acquisitions (i.e., Nynex, GTE, etc., and potentially Frontier). Those acquisitions enabled Verizon to reach significant scale to build out its cellular and cable TV businesses.

This maximize growth thru scale approach was particularly important for Verizon as it has never been a particularly innovative company like IBM or AT&T (Bell Labs), and is more of a market follower from both a technology and business trends standpoint. A large part of that comes from Verizon's (formally "Bell Atlantic") historical role as a Baby Bell which received all of it's technology and strategic direction from AT&T ("Ma Bell"). To this day, Verizon suffers a corporate identity crisis symbolic by the takeover of AT&T's former World Headquarters in Basking Ridge, NJ and now assumption of power by a former AT&T Executive, Dan Schulman, as CEO.

In summary, pursuing such a corporate breakup could potentially be the catalyst for accelerating Verizon's long term demise rather than enabling successful market driven spinoffs given it runs diametrically counter to everything Verizon has ever known or aspired to since it was spun off from AT&T in 1984.