T-Mobile, Sprint to merge in all-stock deal
"T-Mobile US Inc. and Sprint Corp. agreed on Sunday to merge in an all-stock transaction, following on-again, off-again talks to combine the two companies." foxbusiness.com/markets/t-mobile-sprint-to-merge-in-all-stock-deal
T-Mobile and Sprint to Attempt Merger
T-Mobile and Sprint have reached an agreement to merge. The combined company would be called T-Mobile. Now they face the regulators, and are already arguing for it as a move for America to remain competitive with China on 5G:
T-Mobile and Sprint reached a $26.5 billion merger agreement Sunday that would reduce the U.S. wireless industry to three major players — that is, if the Trump administration's antitrust regulators let the deal go through. The nation's third- and fourth-largest wireless companies have been considering a combination for years, one that would bulk them up to a similar size as industry giants Verizon and AT&T. But a 2014 attempt fell apart amid resistance from the Obama administration.
Consumers worry a less crowded telecom field could result in higher prices, while workers unions are concerned about potential job losses.
In a conference call with Wall Street analysts, Sprint CEO Marcelo Claure acknowledged that getting regulatory approval is "the elephant in the room," and one of the first things the companies did after sending out the deal's news release was to call Ajit Pai, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission. The companies stressed that they plan to have more employees following the combination, particularly in rural areas, than they do as stand-alone companies now. They also emphasized that the deal would help accelerate their development of faster 5G wireless networks and ensure that the U.S. doesn't cede leadership on the technology to China.
And they said the combination would allow them to better compete not only with AT&T and Verizon but also with Comcast and others as the wireless, broadband and video industries converge. "This isn't a case of going from 4 to 3 wireless companies — there are now at least 7 or 8 big competitors in this converging market," T-Mobile chief executive John Legere said in a statement.
T-Mobile press release. Also at Bloomberg.
Related Stories
Trump security team sees building U.S. 5G network as option
President Donald Trump's national security team is looking at options to counter the threat of China spying on U.S. phone calls that include the government building a super-fast 5G wireless network, a senior administration official said on Sunday. The official, confirming the gist of a report from Axios.com, said the option was being debated at a low level in the administration and was six to eight months away from being considered by the president himself.
The 5G network concept is aimed at addressing what officials see as China's threat to U.S. cyber security and economic security. [...] "We want to build a network so the Chinese can't listen to your calls," the senior official told Reuters. "We have to have a secure network that doesn't allow bad actors to get in. We also have to ensure the Chinese don't take over the market and put every non-5G network out of business."
[...] Major wireless carriers have spent billions of dollars buying spectrum to launch 5G networks, and it is unclear if the U.S. government would have enough spectrum to build its own 5G network. [...] Another option includes having a 5G network built by a consortium of wireless carriers, the U.S. official said. "We want to build a secure 5G network and we have to work with industry to figure out the best way to do it," the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity. Axios published documents it said were from a presentation from a National Security Council official. If the government built the network, it would rent access to carriers, Axios said.
Will it include "responsible encryption"?
Related: U.S. Lawmakers Urge AT&T to Cut Ties With Huawei
(Score: 3, Interesting) by arcz on Monday April 30 2018, @02:51PM (4 children)
(Score: 2, Redundant) by realDonaldTrump on Monday April 30 2018, @03:59PM (2 children)
They did that in Nebraska. Sprint covers a lot of Nebraska. But no T-Mobile in Nebraska. The rest of our tremendous country, they didn't do that. I love Nebraska. Thousands of people came to my rally at the Omaha airport. Governor Ricketts is a big fan. But I was elected to represent ALL of America. Stop the merger because of Nebraska? Sorry, no, we’re gonna have unity!!!
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Runaway1956 on Monday April 30 2018, @04:07PM (1 child)
No, knucklehead, not because Nebraska. Because constituents. So, several hundred majority stockholders stand to be extremely rich due to the mergers. And, a couple dozen executives stand to get rich. But, you have literally MILLIONS of constituents who will be fucked over by this merger. It's the competition that matters. You have far more than adequate proof that those big corporations aren't going to do anything at all for your constituents. They took those billions of dollars years ago, on some vague promise of delivering broadband internet to that "last mile". What did they actually do? They colluded with each other to screw all of us.
Open your eyes.
“I have become friends with many school shooters” - Tampon Tim Walz
(Score: 3, Informative) by realDonaldTrump on Monday April 30 2018, @05:25PM
The majority shareholder of T-Mobile is Deutsche Telekom. Germany owns a big piece of DT. Big piece. And the majority shareholder of Sprint is SoftBank Group -- that one is Japanese. When they merge, no majority shareholder. But DT will be the biggest. Despite what you have heard from the Fake News, I had a GREAT meeting with German Chancellor Angela Merkel.
Let me tell you, the CEO of SoftBank Group made me a tremendous promise. They're going to invest $50 billion in our economy and create 50,000 jobs. Part of the 25 MILLION new jobs in my plan. And they've already started, they invested $1 billion. So I want them to do very well. So the American people will do very well. And I will win again in 2020.
Believe me, this isn't about President Bill Clinton's $200 Billion Broadband Scandal (very corrupt). Sprint wasn't part of that. And T-Mobile wasn't part of it. You're thinking of the Bell companies. This is about the cell phones. Many people are saying, it's very unfair that Sprint & T-Mobile pretended to be small businesses, they call it Designated Entities. And it was unfair. That was a Bush Jr. number. It was a long time ago. And maybe, probably not, our government can get that money -- billions of dollars -- back. But the merger won't stop us from getting it back. And stopping the merger won't get you your broadband. You don't have Sprint broadband, you don't have T-Mobile broadband. Right? If you were going to get it, you would have it by now. Because broadband is not so new. They were talking about it in the time of Bush Original.
America is in the game and we're going to win. To win, we must compete with every instrument of our national power. If our companies are small & weak, we'll lose big time!!!
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 30 2018, @06:43PM
What are you talking about? I see lots of overlap on the coverage maps. [cellularmaps.com]
(Score: 4, Informative) by tangomargarine on Monday April 30 2018, @03:06PM (3 children)
The fuck does this even mean? Deeply suspicious that this is a bald-faced lie.
Oh this is a link. Let's see what it's about...
Well that sort of muddied the waters and did nothing to reassure me. The perpetual irony of congresscritters who are terrified of people observing them, while they're doing everything they can to make sure that the plebs are under as much surveillance as possible.
But ignoring the authoritarian anal probe squad, how are U.S. cellular companies even competing with China in the first place? Does China even let the U.S. sell phones in China? Or there are places abroad where both are sold?
Much more directly, obviously the merger reduces competition in the U.S., which is what I assume the real reason is.
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 4, Interesting) by takyon on Monday April 30 2018, @03:54PM
The play here might be that the U.S. doesn't want China to get a foothold in various markets with their networking equipment. We don't want China to put backdoored equipment everywhere. We want strong U.S. backdoors. And while the U.S. could simply ban [soylentnews.org] Chinese companies domestically [soylentnews.org], European and Asian companies might not go for that.
China is beating the United States in the race for 5G [cnn.com]
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by LoRdTAW on Monday April 30 2018, @07:31PM
We've always been at war with Eastasia.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Thexalon on Monday April 30 2018, @07:49PM
All their arguments in favor of the merger are baldface lies.
The real reason they're merging is:
1. The game theory is simpler with fewer players in the game. If there's only T-Sprint, Verizon, and AT&T, that makes it easier for the three of them to price-fix higher and provide crappier service without explicitly colluding than if there are 4 of them.
2. The upper management of both companies will make bank as Wall Street reacts favorably to the previous point.
The goal of all businesses is to become an unregulated monopoly, because that means arbitrarily large profits with pretty much zero accountability. If they can't become an unregulated monopoly in something essential, they'll aim to be the next-best thing, which is an unregulated oligopoly in something essential. In the oligopoly, the only possible accountability is one of the other players in the oligopoly trying to compete on price or service, but it's usually more profitable for each player to sit back and milk profits by overcharging and/or underproviding.
"Think of how stupid the average person is. Then realize half of 'em are stupider than that." - George Carlin
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Virindi on Monday April 30 2018, @03:29PM (2 children)
One has to wonder, since "merge with a competitor to reduce competition" seems to now be #1 in the MBA playbook, what will happen when they run out of competitors. It seems to be fast approaching that point in many industries. They will be able to crank up prices and cheap out service for awhile, but after a few years such strategies will see diminishing returns......and the MBAs and Wall Street will need to find some other way to artificially boost numbers.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Arik on Monday April 30 2018, @03:55PM
1. Acquire/merge.
2. Eliminate every cost you can get away with eliminating in the short term. This means real redundancies as well as core competencies are lost (and even if you care you may have difficulty distinguishing the two,) but in the short term you can certainly show an astonishing turnaround and incredible profits.
3. Exit. Collect your bonuses, DO pass GO, DO move on to another venture, or retire if you prefer, but get the heck out of dodge and liquify all your holding BEFORE
4. The collapse. This can be a dramatic event (as with Enron) or a slow and drawn out affair (as with our ISPs here in the US) but it's the inevitable result of step 2.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 30 2018, @07:49PM
Combined, Sprint and T-mobile will be smaller than both AT&T and Verizon. Read that again, combined the new company will still be in third place by subscribers and by revenue. It will be a long time before they run out of competitors.
IMO, what this merger will accomplish is put more pressure on AT&T and Verizon to compete harder. A strong third will push them harder than 2 weak 3rd/4th companies.
(Score: 3, Funny) by bzipitidoo on Monday April 30 2018, @03:54PM
If T-Mobile merged with ExxonMobil, would the new name be T-RexxonMobile?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 30 2018, @04:36PM (4 children)
We already let bigger companies merge, creating bigger problems. It isn't fair or reasonable to now say that T-Mobile can't do likewise.
We broke up AT&T for good reason, but lobbying and short memories let it get back together again. Maybe they will merge with Verizon.
Breaking up companies is very difficult work. It requires a legal battle that lasts longer than a presidential term.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Monday April 30 2018, @06:14PM (3 children)
The one thing I'll say here is that Spring and T-mobile are the #3 and #4 wireless companies right now: basically the two biggest losers. They've been hoping to merge for a long time, because neither one of them is doing all that great by themselves.
If one of the companies were Verizon, I think it'd be completely obvious that such a merger shouldn't go through. Verizon is probably easily the biggest wireless company now, so a merger with them would only create a near-monopoly, and probably a real monopoly before too long. But with T-mo and Sprint, if they don't merge, how likely is it that one of them will simply fail after a while?
Personally, I use Ting which is a Spring MVNO, and I'm going to be switching to a Verizon MVNO pretty soon because I'm sick of Sprint's lousy signal quality, and I can get a deal that's just as cheap, if not cheaper, with a Verizon MVNO.
(Score: 2) by DavePolaschek on Monday April 30 2018, @07:20PM (2 children)
Ting is also a T-Mobile MVNO if you switch to a GSM phone.
(Score: 2, Disagree) by Grishnakh on Monday April 30 2018, @08:20PM (1 child)
Oh yeah, I forgot about that. That's not much help: T-mobile's network is even worse than Sprint's. I used to be a T-mo customer years ago.
It's too bad Ting never figured out how to make universal unlocked phones work on both networks simultaneously; it'd help their performance a lot I suspect, being able to switch at will between the networks (not on the same call though, I'm sure).
(Score: 2) by DavePolaschek on Tuesday May 01 2018, @03:36PM
T-Mo's gotten a lot better. Used to be driving I-80 from the Mississippi to Reno you'd be mostly without signal. Now you even get data most of that way, and US 40 and US 50 have coverage much of the way. They've really filled in the gaps in the west in the past two years.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by bob_super on Monday April 30 2018, @05:02PM (1 child)
That level of bullshit is so high even NASA is having issues measuring it. I told them Cassini was still useful, but did they listen?
Seriously, I'd like names, because I sure as hell am not going to consider wi-fi hopping to be a "carrier-class" solution when going down 99.9% of US roads.
(Score: 4, Informative) by Grishnakh on Monday April 30 2018, @06:16PM
Yeah, WTF are they talking about? There's precisely 4 wireless companies in the US, that's it: Verizon, AT&T, Sprint, T-mobile. All other companies are just resellers (MVNOs), and maybe some shitty little regional companies for rural areas which still ride on the 4 big companies when their customers leave the area.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 30 2018, @07:01PM
And a monopoly is what you get.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Gaaark on Monday April 30 2018, @08:02PM
I thought Americans were capitalists. Capitalism is about competition, no?
See, Americans aren't really capitalists; they're just greedy and only think about now, now, now....
Don't allow it.
It would be dumb: maybe not for the rich but for the future.
Don't be dumb.
Shit like this, like allowing Monsanto and Bayer to merge: dumb.
We gotta take control back from stupid, greedy idiots.
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. I have always been here. ---Gaaark 2.0 --