Finance History | Whitacre Tower — SBC Paid Sixteen Billion and Took the T Ticker Back

People treat the T ticker as a line that never broke.

It did. For twenty months the letters belonged to a shrinking long-distance company that had already left the Dow.

On 18 November 2005 SBC Communications Inc. closed its purchase of AT&T Corp. The merger agreement dated 30 January 2005 exchanged each AT&T Corp. share for 0.77942 shares of the surviving company plus a 1.30 dollar special dividend.

SBC issued about 632 million shares. Using the 24.17 dollar close of SBC stock on 17 November 2005, the last session before closing, the SEC filing put the consideration at about 15.3 billion dollars. Contemporary reports rounded the deal to 16 billion dollars in stock and cash.

The surviving corporation kept SBC's legal structure and stock-price history and took the AT&T Inc. name. AT&T Corp. common stock, which had traded as T, left the New York Stock Exchange that day.

On 1 December 2005 the combined company began trading under T. The symbol had first appeared on the Boston Stock Exchange in 1888 for American Bell and had been AT&T Corp.'s New York tape name since 1930. SBC had used SBC since the 1984 Bell breakup.

The mechanism is a regional operating company buying its former parent and renting the parent's ticker. The listing continuity that investors read off the tape is a brand choice, not a surviving charter.

Whitacre Tower at 208 South Akard Street in Dallas is the public headquarters today. AT&T moved the corporate office here from San Antonio in 2008. The pin is the sidewalk on Akard, not a floor plate.

Photo: FoUTASportscaster, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. Whitacre Tower from the southeast.