Teletouch Communications Inc. recently doubled its customer base and fattened its South Central U.S. footprint with the acquisition of the paging assets of Dial-A-Page Inc. for $49.8 million.
The privately held, Russellville, Ark.-based Dial-A-Page operates in Arkansas, Tennessee, Mississippi and Missouri, with about 95,000 pagers in service.
Teletouch, a company with 30-year-old roots in a Texas telephone answering service, serves much of the Lone Star State as well as Jackson, Miss., Memphis and Nashville, Tenn. The Dial-A-Page purchase gives Teletouch 170,000 pagers in service.
“We plan to be an aggressive reseller of PCS (personal communications service),” said David Higginbotham, Teletouch president and chief operating officer.
This is the third acquisition in less than a year for Teletouch, a company that just became public last December. Using the $7.5 million generated by the initial public offering and $19 million in financing from Finova Capital Corp., the company made two acquisitions that same month.
Teletouch paid about $20 million for Beepers Plus, a company operating in Jackson, Miss., Memphis and Nashville, Tenn., with 43,000 pagers in service. Teletouch also bought Waco Communications and its 4,300 pagers in service for about $3 million.
For the Dial-A-Page acquisition, Teletouch received $25 million in financing from Continental Illinois Venture Corp. and $35 million in additional financing from Finova.
The Dial-A-Page purchase gave Teletouch a second operation in the Memphis market, making Teletouch a dominant carrier there. Much of the Dial-A-Page coverage area is adjacent to or overlaps Teletouch’s coverage area, so Teletouch will seek to integrate the Dial-A-Page network into its existing operation.
Teletouch plans to keep the Dial-A-Page brand name for the next six months to a year, Higginbotham said, noting it is a strong name and was purchased along with the paging assets.
“We modified the Beepers Plus name by integrating `by Teletouch’ to it, but we haven’t made a decision on Dial-A-Page. We may start a transition to a common name at some point,” Higginbotham said.
Last year, about 96 percent of Dial-A-Page’s revenues were derived from paging services, the use of leased pagers and pager sales. Dial-A-Page had experienced strong growth in recent years, from 18,000 units in service the end of 1992 to 87,000 units in service year end 1994.
