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Failure of Sprint/T-Mobile Merger Means a Missed Chance To Save $30B (kansascity.com)
UPDATE (11/5/17): Sprint and T-Mobile confirmed Saturday that they've ended their merger talks, saying they were "unable to find mutually agreeable terms." The Kansas City Star reports that the failure "means shareholders of the two companies gave up $30 billion or more in cost savings that their managements had expected a merger to generate.
"One combined wireless company would have needed to invest less in its network than the two competing companies spend separately... Absent a merger, Sprint now faces a highly competitive marketplace as the smallest national player and with a more aggressive rival in T-Mobile."
Several news outlets had already reported on Monday that Japan's conglomerate SoftBank, which owns Sprint, has pulled the plug on a proposed merger between the two carriers. From a report: SoftBank will reportedly propose ending merger talks with T-Mobile parent company Deutsche Telekom as soon as Tuesday, October 31st. That's according to Nikkei, which says that SoftBank wants to end merger talks due to "a failure to agree on ownership of the combined entity." It's said that Deutsche Telekom insisted on a controlling stake of the combined T-Mobile-Sprint, and that some people at SoftBank were okay with that as long as SoftBank had some sort of influence. However, SoftBank's board recently decided that it wouldn't give up control, and today it decided that it wants to call off the merger talks.
Last Monday Sprint and T-Mobile shares both fell immediately following the media reports.
"One combined wireless company would have needed to invest less in its network than the two competing companies spend separately... Absent a merger, Sprint now faces a highly competitive marketplace as the smallest national player and with a more aggressive rival in T-Mobile."
Several news outlets had already reported on Monday that Japan's conglomerate SoftBank, which owns Sprint, has pulled the plug on a proposed merger between the two carriers. From a report: SoftBank will reportedly propose ending merger talks with T-Mobile parent company Deutsche Telekom as soon as Tuesday, October 31st. That's according to Nikkei, which says that SoftBank wants to end merger talks due to "a failure to agree on ownership of the combined entity." It's said that Deutsche Telekom insisted on a controlling stake of the combined T-Mobile-Sprint, and that some people at SoftBank were okay with that as long as SoftBank had some sort of influence. However, SoftBank's board recently decided that it wouldn't give up control, and today it decided that it wants to call off the merger talks.
Last Monday Sprint and T-Mobile shares both fell immediately following the media reports.
Deutsche Telekom (Parent company of T-Mobile USoA) has been trying to get rid of T-Mobile USoA for years (lustres, maybe even decades)...
That's why these news about mergers in the Cell-Comm industry always involves T-Mobile as One of the actors.
And while is true that the company went public when it reverse-merged with MetroPCS, the germans have not been able to get rid of it selling shares in the Opent Market.
At this time, the Germans should realize that this repeated efforts to sell T-Mobile to another Cell-Comm concern is not the path forward, and instead knock the Door of Spectrum/charter or Comcast and merge (with one of them, although Comcas and Charter have a strange agreement regarding Cell-Com services), to be a Wireless+Cable+Wireline Concern. To sweeten the deal, they may make a pure stock merger. This will dilute ownership for them, allowing for an easier selling of shares in the open market.
And now, a little MBA FanFic:
1.) A meger between T-Mobile and a Big CableCo will force Sprint to merge with the other.
2.) The merged entity resulting from Charter will, sooner or later, knock on the door of CBS/Viacom to Acquire the CW + some other table scraps.
3.) The two merged entities will race to merge/acquire Dish.
At that point, we will end up 4 comparable giants in the Wireless+Wireline+Cable+DTH+Content, but instead of being equal in every dimension, will be bigger in some, and smaller in others...
Then we would see a little bit more competition from these oligopolies... Trying to leverage their strengths in one dimension to capture customers to reinforce their weaker dimensions...
One can only hope.
*** Suerte a todos y Feliz dia!
Actually strike what I said in that previous reply...Sprint has been saying that big upgrades are right around the corner, usually placing 3-6 month timespans, for the past 12 years. They have a tower upgrade map that always shows these short timespans, ranging anywhere from a month or a year, where they say the tower is being upgraded. Meanwhile, that entire time, the service kept getting worse and worse.
Oh and: https://www.cnet.com/news/spri...
It's well past that two years, and two years before that, Sprint said "pardon our dust":
http://www.cnn.com/2013/11/21/...
Seriously, this is nothing new with Sprint. I was with them for a very long time before I got tired of their shit, especially when they blatantly lied to me saying that my dropped call rate was 0%, and during that same call I got dropped, the rep actually called me back, I said WTF, and she said "I don't know what that was."