AT&T completes sale of Wireless stake

LOS ANGELES: AT&T Wireless Services Inc. said on Monday that former

parent AT&T Corp. had sold off its remaining equity stake in the No. 3 US

wireless telephone company.

Since July, New York-based AT&T, which has been selling assets to reduce

its debt, has sold about 91 million shares at prevailing market prices in

Redmond, Washington-based AT&T Wireless, the company said in a statement.

AT&T held about $3 billion in AT&T Wireless shares when it spun off

AT&T Wireless as a separate company in July. The long-distance giant opted

to cut that stake by $1.6 billion at the time of the spin-off and said it would

sell the remainder of its equity holdings over the following months.

Last week, New York-based AT&T Corp. announced a deal to sell its cable

television unit to Comcast Corp for about $47 billion in stock.

AT&T had run up about $65 billion in debt as of the end of last year

after a push into cable television through acquisitions in 1998 and 1999. The

company had reduced that debt load to $38.5 billion as of the end of September

and projected that the Comcast deal will cut that amount by more than half

again.

Japan's No. 1 wireless carrier NTT DoCoMo remains the largest single investor

in AT&T Wireless with a near 16 per cent stake, according to spokesman David

Caouette.

(C) Reuters Limited.