SoftBank Is Willing To Cede Control of Sprint To Get T-Mobile Merger Done, Says Report (phonedog.com)

According to Reuters, SoftBank is willing to cede control of Sprint to make a T-Mobile-Sprint merger happen. The company controls 83 percent of Sprint, but it'd reportedly be willing to surrender control of Sprint and retain a minority stake in a merger with T-Mobile. PhoneDog reports: It's said that SoftBank is growing frustrated with Sprint's lack of major growth in the U.S. market, and so it wants to merge with T-Mobile in order to better compete with Verizon and ATT. No talks between SoftBank and Deutsche Telekom are currently happening because of the FCC's 600MHz spectrum auction that prevents collusion between competing companies. Once the auction ends in April, though, it's expected that SoftBank will approached Deutsche Telekom about a deal.

Comments

Makes perfect sense to me.

[mmell]

They'd rather hold a minority stake in something good than a majority stake in something crappy!

It all comes down to two things - who has the most network bandwidth, and who has the most cellular bandwidth. Or just one thing - who can deliver the most bandwidth?

FCC allocates cellular (radio frequency) bandwidth in the US. Backbone (network) bandwidth? That's strictly a matter of investing in infrastructure, so . . . who owns (or is owned by) how many politico's in power?

Growth Mania

[Princeofcups]

"SoftBank is growing frustrated with Sprint's lack of major growth in the U.S. market"

What is wrong is a stable successful profitable company? It seems that everyone thinks that a company that isn't growing every year is not a good company. There's plenty of wealth and resources on this planet for everyone. The end goal is not to have one winner who owns everything.

Sprint needs to sell spectrum, not F up T-Mobile

[RubberDogBone]

T-Mobile doesn't need to be contaminated with a wireless carrier STD, which is what Sprint is these days. Sure the booty may be cheap but you don't want it.

Taking some of Sprint's spectrum might be nice.

But T-Mobile seems to be doing well with the spectrum they have and the customers they have, and gain, every quarter. All T-Mobile has to do to be successful is stay on the path. Buying Sprint would take them off that path and put them on a new one where they have two networks to deal with and two probably very different customer bases and two sets of retail stores and all the other overlap. It is a huge risk to T-Mobile that this will derail their success and instead saddle them with Sprint's mess.

See what happened to Time Warner after it bought AOL. Two valued and successful companies now both worth a fraction of their prior values. They didn't sum. They subtracted.