“Japanese mobile carrier Softbank Corp. is in advanced talks to buy U.S. wireless carrier Sprint Nextel Corp. for roughly $13 billion, a person with knowledge of the negotiations said Thursday,” Daisuke Wakabayashi and Anton Troianovski report for The Wall Street Journal.
“It wasn’t immediately clear whether Softbank would buy all of Sprint, which has a market capitalization of $15 billion, or a two-thirds stake, the person said,” Wakabayashi and Troianovski report. “There was also no assurance the talks would result in a deal.”
Wakabayashi and Troianovski report, “Softbank’s deal with Sprint, the person said, would likely involve a multibillion-dollar cash injection and possibly a tender offer to buy shares on the secondary market. Then Sprint could use its stronger balance sheet to consider buying other carriers, the person said. One target could be Clearwire Corp., a wireless-broadband network in which Sprint already owns a large stake. Shares of Sprint and Clearwire jumped in morning trading. Clearwire owns large chunks of spectrum in the U.S. and is planning to start a next-generation network using TDD LTE technology. Softbank is working to build a similarly structured high-speed network.”
Read more in the full article here.
A stronger Sprint would help Apple and its iPhone sales. Sprint is committed for four years so a strong Sprint would be a positive. Better the Japanese than the Chinese.
A stronger Sprint would help my stock portfolio since I bought Sprint when their stock price tanked after they invested in the iPhone.
A stronger T-mobile that carries iPhones would be nice too. I’d rather that AT&T have to win my business on the basis of value of service.
Sprint’s stock basically up 100% since June.
There’s some double downed possibilities there for an Apple pact.
An America company can’t buy controlling interest in a Japanese, Chinese, or Korean company, but they can? we are fu–ed.
Clear sucks. Sprint would be smart to cut their losses there and run in the opposite direction.