Bellsouth
BellSouth Corporation was formed in 1983 and employs about 63,000 people. The company has revenue of 20.5 billion, 40% of which came from Cingular Wireless. Their main goals are to provide the best telecommunication services to their customers. Its business strategy had three parts: to provide premium local service in the Southeast, to maintain its substantial wireless communications business across the rest of the country, and to continue to expand into the booming Latin American communications market (BellSouth Corporation, 1999).
Before the AT&T merger, BellSouth has had a major decline in net income which resulted in job cuts for many employees. This decrease of income is a result of competition due to a low demand in residential and small business lines from independent startup telephone companies that was created by the 1996 Telecommunications Act. The competition in the local phone market finally undid some of the regulation that the company had long lobbied to overturn. While the old system had required BellSouth to return a portion of its profits to its customers, and letting the competitors flock into its territory (BellSouth Corporation, 1999).
The communications industry was drastically changing in the late 1990's, as companies consolidated. Although, BellSouth lost individual accounts, it increased profits by selling wholesale access to its lines to the new competitors. They started offering other services such as providing 24-hour, seven day customer service. BellSouth also gained revenues from some of their other calling features, such as Caller ID, Call Waiting, FastAccess DSL, but they still did make enough to bring them profitability to cover cost (BellSouth Corporation, 1999).
Due to competition BellSouth considered ...