Originally Posted by
Kootur
everyone keeps bringing up that. The fact is these are two WAY different mergers. The airlines can't grow and can only merge. Tmobile and at&T are healthy companies that can grow on their own. The only reason so many mergers fail when the doj intervenes is because most companies don't want to go to trial. US/AA are taking it to the bitter end.
This merger is almost past the point of no return. US sold their company HQ in Tempe. Most of AA's former leadership has moved on as they were told they would not be a part of this new company. Gates have already been combined. USairs 330's coming this year have the new american branding in them. US has stopped selling codes on UA flight and has changed it's flight numbers to mirror AAs.
Not to mention all the sensitive company info that has already been passed around. The merger for all purposes has already been completed the only left to do is flip the switch.
Hopefully the courts won't care if these two companies went charging ahead prematurely, and will make their decision based on what's best for the consumer. That may or may not be approving the merger-- honestly I'm skeptical that going from 4 legacy carriers to 3 is good for the consumer (and face it, US is way more of a legacy than a LCC) but I'm not a financial analyst so I don't know. I do know that corporations that strong-arm their way past any oversight or regulations that they don't like are already way too common, and are usually putting profit ahead of the consumer's best interest. If the DOJ won't budge and US and AA have to eat the costs of reprinting planes or reconfiguring gates, that's their own fault and shouldn't be the court's concern. I would assume that these costs were also identified as possible risks, and accepted, although I'm sure that's not going to stop some high-powered attorney from pleading that the cost of reprinting the planes will be an unfair financial burden.
As to the executives, not a one of those guys walked away without a nice fat severance package, cry me a river, neither airline is going to have a hard time filling those slots if the DOJ won't budge.
As to the US Airways headquarters, it sounds like US leases that space, and that they're locked into the lease till 2016.
http://www.bizjournals.com/phoenix/n....html?page=all. So they got a new landlord (and US still owns 25% of the building). A new landlord who would be unlikely to refuse to keep them on as a tenant after the lease expires, given how much vacant commercial real estate there is on the market, not just in Tempe but pretty much anywhere.
It will be really interesting to see how this ends up, but I sincerely hope the deciding factors are more about what is best for the consumer and not what's best for a massive REIT, or a bunch of executives with multi-million-dollar severance packages.