Clues point to Qwest deal.

• Author: Schwab, Robert
• Position: On Colorado - Qwest Communications International Inc. is looking for a merger partner

QWEST COMMUNICATIONS INTERNATIONAL INC., WHICH many people know as one of my favorite companies from my days as a reporter and columnist in the business pages of The Denver Post, became the "buyout Bell of the ball" last month (to use The Post's headline), following the announced acquisition of Bell South by AT & T.

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Many people in Colorado must be wondering what's happening at Qwest, which is the state's largest company and its highest ranked Fortune 500 company with more than 40,000 employees and 2004 revenues of $13.8 billion.

I may be doing a little reading of tea leaves here, but I have always advised our magazine readers to cull our issues for business clues of what is to come by reading between the lines of all our columns, features and the business profiles that we write in our departments, like Attitude at Altitude (page 13).

I think our writers cast our stories forward to give readers a perspective on Colorado companies and the state's economy that has a shelf life of at least the 30 days or so our monthly magazine stays metaphorically in their hands.

ColoradoBiz put Qwest's chairman and CEO Dick Notebaert on the cover of our December, 2004 issue and asked our readers: "Would you buy a used phone company from this man?"

Notebaert has turned Qwest around from the suspect regime of former CEO Joe Nacchio. It was during and before Nacchio's career at Qwest, during Sol Trujillo's day, when the company was still known here as U.S. West, that I believed it the worst managed large corporation west of the Mississippi.

But today is a different day, and I believe The Post's headline is correct--despite subsequent newspaper coverage of the Bell South/AT & T aftermath.

In that coverage, most newspaper writers tried to discount the possibility of a Qwest merger, holding that its huge debt, an estimated $15 billion, and smaller market capitalization, $12 billion, argued against a wise purchase or merger on the part of a variety of companies, ranging from Verizon, which Qwest bid against in an attempted purchase of MCI, to cable and satellite-TV providers, to private equity firms like the Carlyle Group, Apollo Advisors or Kohlberg Kravis Roberts, all of which have or have had Colorado connections.

Yet Qwest's own Chief Financial Officer Oren Schaffer gave the strongest hint yet that Qwest might be looking for a merger partner. He was quoted as telling a conference audience in Florida: "I think...