@thunderhead am thinking the same. In their favour, they have so far retained the CEO of OTW, and he has clearly become a valued and trusted member of the team, having been made CEO of Symbio. That speaks to a positive and inclusive management culture, the absence of which can cause problems in integrating businesses.

But it does raise a question. The choice is, to play it safe and bale out, or believe that Phil and his team have the leadership capability and experience to see this through.

All that said, $SYM and $SLC will create an internal focus, and what differentiates $ABB is their customer focus. The history or acquisitions is covered in cases where customer focus was lost. So there is no escaping that it is a risk.

Very surprised to hear this. Superloop is not a high quality business and I am struggling to see the value add they bring the table. Two main points:

• Superloop's fibre infastructure, while providing ABB with expanded coverage, is much poorer quality than that of ABB's -- a good portion of their coverage is in areas lacking demand, whereas ABB's rollout was much more deliberate in targeting in-demand areas.
• Superloop is principally an ISP -- a reseller of NBN. Aussie's other acquisitions have targeted value adding services to their already existing business streams. Do Aussie need to strengthen their ISP? I would suggest no. But what they do acquire is probably the next tier of customers (outside of ABB customers) that prioritise speed and service. At the very least, Superloop has a solid reputation relating to both. I wouldn't suggest this is anywhere near a good enough reason to acquire them though.

The devil will be in the detail.

@Rocket6 I hope Phil runs an investor presentation to set out his thinking. He probably wont until they get acceptance of an unconditional offer. It has got me scratching my head. I also wonder what $ABB's plan is to expand network coverage. I historically considered their being focused on high demand areas was a strength and not a limitation. I wonder if the rationale is little more than scale of customer base to support greater scale in customer acquistion resourcing, and concentrating the "attacker" segement.

The conundrum I have is that my valuation of $4.50 ($3.67-$5.04) is predicated on organic growth post-OTW. I haven't got my head around what the new business looks like in terms of trajectory and margins, and I haven't figured out how to think about acquistion/integration risks.

One choice I am considering is to bank the fantastic returns of the last 18 months, and sit on the sidelines for a bit. The investment thesis for $ABB was as a customer-centric, attacker, with a quality network and technology, and a focus on high value customers. The more it bulks up inorganically, the more stretched the thesis becomes.

I have to ask myself, am I drifting into thesis creep with judgement and analysis clouded by the returns to date?

Risk levels have certainly increased with this name given the relatively short span between two key acquisitions.

Gotta say I agree with @thunderhead, @Rocket6 and @mikebrisy. If it's purely a growth by acquisition strategy, then unless it is done well, there may be a customer service hit leading to high margin customers going elsewhere.

A bit like what happened to iiNet, although in that acquisition, it was TPG, a budget ISP, acquiring iiNet.

Watching very carefully and considering taking money off the table.