Biography|Carlos Slim — The Parque Vía Building He Took When Mexico Sold Its Phone Company

On 9 December 1990 Mexico's Finance Ministry named the winner of the Telmex sale.

The New York Times printed the result the next morning. A consortium of Grupo Carso, Southwestern Bell and France Télécom would pay 1.76 billion dollars for a 20.4 percent stake that carried voting control of Teléfonos de México.

Carso's share of that cheque, the Times recorded, was 859.6 million dollars for 10.4 percent of the stock.

The Mexican partners had to hold the majority inside the consortium. That was the rule written into the auction.

UNM's NotiSur digest dated the announcement to 9 December and the expected deposit to 20 December. Company histories inside Grupo Carso and Expansión date the handover of the firm to 19 December 1990.

Telmex's own headquarters then, and now, sat at Avenida Parque Vía 198 in Colonia Cuauhtémoc.

Encyclopedia.com listed that address through the 1990s. The company's privacy notices still use it.

What arrived at this door was not a modern network.

Goldman Sachs, adviser on the sale, later wrote that Mexico in 1989 had 4.9 telephone lines per hundred people, and that eight of ten homes had no service.

Expansión, twenty years on, recalled waiting lists of more than two years and more than two million names still queued behind 5.4 million working lines.

President Carlos Salinas had announced the privatization in September 1989. Bids went in on 15 November 1990.

Three groups reached the final table. Grupo Gentor came in lower.

Acciones y Valores with GTE and Telefónica de España came in just under Carso.

Slim had spent 1982 buying when the peso crash emptied the market. Telmex was the same habit at national scale: take a battered utility, keep Mexican control, bring in operators who already ran phones.

The building on Parque Vía is a working headquarters, not a museum. The moment that changed the company happened on paper at Hacienda and then here, when the new owners walked in.

Photo: Torre de Teléfonos de México, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Portrait: Imperio Reséndiz, Presidencia de la República, public domain.