in cash. According to a report on CBSMarketWatch.com, some analysts thought that BellSouth could have sold its operations for upward of $7 billion, but BellSouth seemed to want to sell the assets off quickly, leading to the lower sale price. While the Latin American market once looked to be a high-growth market for wireless services, the area has grown sluggish in recent years. In Latin America, BellSouth's customer base has been concentrated in Venezuela, Colombia, Argentina and Chile, and the company's Latin American assets generated $2.3 billion in sales and $696 million in operating cash flow in 2003. A good deal? The extra cash generated by the Latin American sale will help BellSouth pay for its portion of the February 2004 acquisition of AT&T Wireless. BellSouth and SBC Communications' jointly owned mobile division, Cingular Wireless, agreed to buy AT&T Wireless for $41 billion. When the AT&T deal was struck, BellSouth said that it expected to borrow up to $10.5 billion to pay for its share of the takeover. BellSouth also said that it expects to contribute about $16 billion to the buyout. Although the original asking price for AT&T Wireless was about $30 billion, VAULT CAREER LIBRARY 2005 Vault Inc. Vault Guide to the Top Telecom Employers BellSouth Corp. Cingular was forced to pay more after a bidding war with Vodafone erupted, with each side upping their offers until Vodafone dropped out. The AT&T Wireless deal comes with plenty of risks for the joint venture, with reports stating that the company may be losing as many as 150,000 subscribers a month now that cell phone users are free to change service providers without losing their phone numbers. During the third quarter of 2003, AT&T Wireless was losing an average of about 600,000 customers a month, but was still managing to sign up enough new subscribers to show a gain of 229,000 for the period. As if that wasn't bad enough, the losses grew to more than 700,000 per month in the fourth quarter, but the company still showed an overall gain of 128,000 cust