By The Economist
THERE is a certain Darwinian poetry that Cable & Wireless Worldwide, a remnant of a once mighty telecoms empire based on telegraph wires and established in the 1850s, looks set to be eaten up by Vodafone, a contemporary telecoms industry giant born only in 1985. Even as late as 1999 C&W (CWW’s predecessor firm) was the significantly larger of the two firms measured by profits. Yet today the offer price of about £1 billion ($1.6 billion) for CWW is the equivalent of just 1% of Vodafone’s market value.
