A bit of breaking news from Bloomberg, with the headline that US Airways and AMR (owner of American Airlines) are to evaluate a possible merger.
As a prelude to such work, both have signed Non-disclosure Agreements (NDA’s) to allow exchange of confidential financial and operational data to evaluate a potential merger of the two carriers.
Both airlines will also work in collaboration with AMR’s s unsecured creditors committee in the process, the carriers said in a statement today.
Doug Parker of US Airways says:
“We are pleased to be working directly with American to study a potential merger and we consider this very good news,”
“It does not mean we are merging — it simply means we have agreed to work together to discuss and analyse a potential merger.”
US Airways has been sniffing around AMR since it went into bankruptcy, and has already gained the support of the unions.
Interestingly, Tom Horton (CEO, AMR) says it also had signed confidentiality agreements with others parties – but has failed to name them at this time.
“As part of the process, other parties have also signed confidentiality agreements, which permit for the confidential exchange of information and discussion between American and those parties.”
The next mega-merger? It could be if all goes to plan.
Lets just hope its doesn’t turn into a disaster should the two companies merge – like when American West Airlines performed a reverse takeover of US Airways…
…or like when CO took over UA!
Not very surprising this all has been in the works for months and now they just formally a NDA release which is procedural at best. This still will take months to resolve and have a bankruptcy preceding in tow does not make the process more streamlined.
DOJ will NEVER approve another mega-merger so I don’t understand why they are even trying… look at T-Mobile/ATT, competition was the issue there and it would be the issue here.
AMR would have a better chance with Alaskan than US Air.
Just Wait US and AA will kill the Merger talks here in about 2-3.5 months and AA will say here why don’t you come Join us here at One World. US will say okay then about a year or so later we will here US-AA merger and people on FT will call it USdbaAA