Wedbush Morgan Securities analyst Michael Pachter has forecasted that US video game sales will have jumped 47 percent year on year from March 2007 to March 2008 to $850 million USD.
More official NPD Group data will be available later this week, but Patcher also reported that the PlayStation 3 will have outsold the Xbox 360 but that both combined were outsold by the ever popular Nintendo Wii. He estimated the Wii sold 700,000 consoles for the month.
More interestingly, Patcher also reported that he belives “Nintendo is now diverting a significant portion of its supply to Europe due to the weakening dollar, but that the company did ship the US its “fair share” in March to support the launch of Super Smash Bros. Brawl.”
For April, Patcher feels sales will be just as high, fueled by titles such as “Army of Two” and “Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Vegas 2.”
Result for: fair share
Reports have surfaced from CNBC that Verizon is in talks to buyout rival carrier Alltel for $27 billion USD, an almost 8x premium over its current pre-interest, pre-tax earnings. The deal would be considered a friendly takeover as Goldman Sachs is in charge of the acquisition.
The reports say that allegedly there was an auction in the spring of last year for the company but that the value was too high. They now see the company’s up front value as low enough to be acquired.
The deal should have its fair share of benefits for the acquiring company however. Alltel’s service areas overlap Verizon’s and Alltel even has a roaming deal with Verizon to allow Alltel customers to borrow Verizon airspace when there is none of their own. Buying out would help reduce competition and increase subscriber totals substantially.
Neither Alltel or Verizon had comments on the speculation. Currently, AT&T has the largest customer base in the US, but this deal could narrow that gap substantially for Verizon.
