With AT&T moving to buy T-Mobile USA, telecom companies are now the second most active deal-makers in the world.
Counting AT&T's proposed bid, industry merger and acquisition volume now tops $172 billion over the past year, surpassing the electric companies for the No. 2 spot. Oil and gas remains the most active industry for M&A with nearly $266 billion of deals, according to Bloomberg data.
Despite the strong industry M&A, AT&T represents the biggest telecom deal, by far. The next largest was back in April 2010, when CenturyLink agreed to buy Qwest Communications for roughly $22 billion.
The T-Mobile acquisition also represents AT&T's most ambitious move in awhile. In late December AT&T agreed to buy some spectrum licenses from Qualcomm for roughly $1.9 billion.
AT&T's last mega merger was back in 2006 when the company bought BellSouth for $83 billion. The T-Mobile transaction would be the second largest deal for AT&T in the past decade.
That assumes, of course, the deal gets the O.K. from regulators, who are likely to scrutinize the deal carefully. AT&T expects this transaction to take a year to go through the necessary approval process. On March 18, the Federal Communications Commission approved Century Link-Qwest tie-up, which was announced back in April 2010.
Source: DealBook
