Rumors of a Dish Network acquisition of T-Mobile have been floating around for years now, and they recently spun up once again. However, a new report claims that the talks between the two companies have stalled.
According to Bloomberg, there is currently “no momentum on this deal.” The reasons for the stall are said to include “valuation and structure,” likely related to who would lead the combined Dish-Mo and how the other executive positions would shake out. It’s expected that if there’s not some movement in the coming months, the two companies will go quiet due to the impending spectrum acquisition and concerns that being chatty could be seen as collusion. Bloomberg goes on to name Comcast, Altice (a Luxembourg-based telecom), and Sprint as potential T-Mobile suitors in 2016.
Dish has spectrum that it’d like to put into use, and we know that wireless carriers — T-Mobile included — want all of the additional spectrum they can get. Those two factors have brought T-Mobile and Dish together in the past, and with T-Mo’s recent Un-carrier success, T-Mobile CEO John Legere has suggested that Dish should be “panting” at the thought of acquiring T-Mo. A deal such as this would have a lot of details that’d need to be ironed out, though, and today’s report suggests that they’re still wrinkled up, which is starting to cast a shadow of doubt on the potential of a Dish-T-Mo deal.
Source: Bloomberg