From The Verge: The number of major wireless carriers in the United States could shrink from four to three. Sprint and T-Mobile have announced that they intend to merge. The merger will need to be approved by regulators and the company’s shareholders.
The combined company will be based in Bellevue Washington and will be called T-Mobile. Current T-Mobile CEO John Legere will run the combined company, while T-Mobile COO Mike Sievert will become the new company’s COO and President. T-Mobile’s majority owner Deutsche Telekom will hold a 42 percent stake in the company, while Sprint majority owner SoftBank will hold 27 percent, with public stakeholders holding the rest. Sprint CEO Marcelo Claure and SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son will sit on the combined company’s board.
The companies say that by combining, they’ll be able to lower prices and take advantage of “greater economies of scale”. The two companies have trailed their larger rivals, AT&T and Verizon, and the merger between Sprint and T-Mobile will help give them a boost as they begin to deploy their next-generation 5G network across the country. The combined company will have nearly 100 million customers.
The merger comes after years of on-and-off talks between the two companies. Sprint had been prepared to buy T-Mobile in 2014, but those talks didn’t go anywhere. The two companies resumed those talks in May of last year, came close in September to reaching a deal, only for Sprint to call them off in October. T-Mobile then made its own offer in November, but that quickly collapsed as well. The talks resumed again earlier this month, and on Friday, CNBC said that the two were closing in on a merger to the tune of $26 billion.
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