UPDATE: A new report from the Wall Street Journal also says that SoftBank wants to back out of the T-Mobile merger, while Reuters says that SoftBank is concerned about losing control of the combined company. Meanwhile, a report from CNBC claims that while there are some struggles in the talks, SoftBank is not planning to back out of the deal.
ORIGINAL: There have been many reports in recent weeks suggesting that a T-Mobile-Sprint merger was all but complete, but now it looks like the deal may not happen.
SoftBank, Sprint’s parent company, 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.
Several reports have surfaced in recent weeks that suggested that T-Mobile, Sprint, and their parent companies had reached a broad agreement and were hammering out the finer details of their deal. It was expected that the merger would be announced sometime in November. Now it sounds like SoftBank and DT may not have been able to agree on how much control each would have over the combined T-Mobile-Sprint.
This news is surprising considering all of the reports that we’ve heard about this T-Mobile-Sprint deal in recent weeks. And while there’s a chance that the companies involved could come to an agreement, it’s now looking like the long-rumored merger involving T-Mobile and Sprint may not happen.
Source: Nikkei