This all started way back in December, when talks of Sprint looking to acquire T-Mobile first surfaced. They began to quiet down around February, but this week the talks seemed to have heated back up again. Reports stated that Softbank and Sprint were looking to make an offer to acquire T-Mobile in June or July of this year. Which is only about a month away, after all it is now May.
This afternoon, sources of the NY Post stated that regulators are not in favor of this merger. Which doesn’t really surprise me. “I don’t see any prospect of it going through,” one source close to the situation told the NY Post. “It’s dead.” The Post also stated that back in January Sprint/Softbank angered the FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler when there was a report out of The WSJ about the merger. That was on the morning that Sprint’s CEO and Chairman was to meet with Wheeler about the acquisition, and he felt that they were trying to pressure him into giving them their blessing for the deal.
On the other hand, Sprint’s CEO and CFO spend the week with Buy- and sell-side analysts explaining why they lost 364,000 net customers this quarter. The NY Post also reported that neither Sprint nor Softbank returned their calls for comments, which isn’t surprising in the least.
So far it’s looking like the FCC can’t be bought, or persuaded into allowing this merger to take place. But it’s also important to remember that this needs to be treated as a rumor and not fact. These are sources of the NY Post informing them of this information. So we’ll have to take it with a grain of salt, at least for now. What do our readers think? A T-Mobile/Sprint acquisition being announced in the next couple of months? Let us know in the comments below.