With two recent large acquisitions tucked under its belt, Arch Communications Group Inc. now intends to knit its coast-to-coast properties together with a common name to give the entity a collective feel and spark the interest of resellers.
Last summer, Arch bought USA Mobile Communications Holdings Inc. for about $450 million in the largest acquisition to date in the U.S. paging industry. Arch’s subscriber count then climbed to 1.5 million.
Arch’s current acquisition of Westlink Holdings Inc.-scheduled to close in the second quarter-is a decisive piece in the carrier’s plan to create a nationwide footprint, the company said. Westlink gives Arch an additional 500,000 subscribers, boosting the carrier’s customer count to about 2.5 million. Arch now is the nation’s third largest paging carrier.
“It makes sense to create a common name,” said Scott Hoyt, vice president of marketing for Arch. Hoyt formerly was marketing vice president for San Diego-based Westlink.
Arch-owned markets now have a regional presence, such as Page New England or Page South. “We don’t want to disrupt the sales momentum they’ve built [in regional markets], but we must consider the marketing powers in this environment,” Hoyt said.
One such power is MCI Communications Corp., which is reselling all kinds of wireless services.
“We won’t be able to develop a brand like that, but we can develop a relationship with these powerful brands, without having to spend millions. To attract these strategic partners, we need to not only have the size and scope, but a new name to unify our personality and be precise about how we conduct ourselves to our customers,” Hoyt said.
Arch is interested in both traditional and non-traditional reselling, such as bundling paging into bank cards. “They can receive their paging charges on their Visa bill. The list is endless. We need to have a national footprint to do that kind of distribution and marketing,” Hoyt said.
Narrowband personal communications services fits into the Arch portfolio two ways: Benbow PCS Ventures Inc. and PCS Development Corp. Benbow holds regional NPCS licenses in the western and central United States. Westlink (now Arch) holds 49.9 percent of Benbow. Arch owns 11 percent of PCSD, which holds NPCS licenses in five U.S. regions. Arch plans to resell PCSD’s two-way paging service.
