Who says you have to be a dot-com entrepreneur to rake in a few million bucks from an IPO?
When AT & T; Corp. issued tracking stock for its wireless unit last week in the largest public offering in history, at least 1,500 Orange County workers,and probably hundreds more OC residents who work in nearby Cerritos,dialed up a healthy portion of the windfall.
Thanks to a stock-option plan that encompassed every AT & T; employee, workers own an average of 600 shares each. That means,based on Thursday’s close at $31.75 per share,OC employees of AT & T; held an average of about $19,000 worth of the stock each, and more than $28.5 million worth in all.
“Did anybody become millionaires? We would hope so, but we don’t have any hard figures,” said John Mendez, a spokesman for the wireless unit.
AT & T; raised $10.6 billion by issuing tracking shares in the wireless unit, which needs the money for infrastructure upgrades and new service offerings. The stock rose about 6% on its first day of trading to give the Wireless Group a market cap of more than $72 billion.
The company is reserving about 10% of the 360 million shares it issued for employees.
The New York-based wireless unit operates a 1,000-person customer-service center in Anaheim Hills, a 200-person telemarketing facility in Cypress and 13 retail stores around the county that employ about 10 each. In addition, parent AT & T; employs another 200 or so in Orange County.
And that total doesn’t include the residents who commute just outside OC borders to AT & T; Wireless’ 1,000-person regional headquarters in Cerritos. Officials couldn’t estimate how many OC denizens work there, but considering its proximity, they said it wouldn’t be unreasonable to expect several hundred.
Tony Suh, a La Palma resident celebrating his anniversary with the unit, even stood beside AT & T; chairman and CEO Michael Armstrong and AT & T; Wireless CEO John Zeglis to help ring the Wall Street’s April 27 opening bell.
The unit faces intense competition from competitors such as Sprint PCS, VoiceStream Wireless, Nextel and Verizon Wireless, the behemoth offspring of a Bell Atlantic/Vodofone/AirTouch merger expected to go public itself later this year.
AT & T; wireless has an estimated 12 million subscribers, far behind Verizon’s 23 million and SBC/Bell South’s 16 million.
In addition to expanding the company’s reach and upgrading its infrastructure, Mendez said, one of his company’s primary focuses this year will be fixed-wireless service, a technology that beams calls, data and video to non-mobile household devices. The service will launch in Los Angeles, Orange County, San Diego and Texas later this year. The company recently launched its PCS wireless Internet services for businesses and will unveil a similar consumer-oriented service for consumers within the months or so.
Some analysts have criticized AT & T;’s decision to lump the fixed-wireless service into the wireless unit since, in practice, it resembles AT & T;’s broadband residential and business services more than it does cellular telephones.
Mendez said he couldn’t predict how quickly the company would expand its Orange County presence, but said he expects substantial growth in coming months. The wireless unit employs about 55,000 nationally. “We’re growing by leaps and bounds,” he said.
