T-Mobile’s bid to buyout the nation’s fifth-largest carrier, MetroPCS, is not going to go down without a fight. According to Businessweek, citing “three people familiar with the matter,” Sprint is now considering entering the bidding process to buyout the company. Sprint is currently talking with its financial advisers to come up with a reasonable price.
Deutsche Telekom, T-Mobile USA’s parent company, entered into plans to buyout MetroPCS earlier this week to boost its United States performance. With Sprint’s network being CDMA, like MetroPCS, it may make more sense for the Now Network to make the purchase.
T-Mobile has been financially hurting recently though; customers are flocking to AT&T, Sprint, and Verizon Wireless for what many believe is a better handset offering. In its Q2 quarterly earnings, T-Mobile reported a grim loss of 205,000 customers compared to 50,000 net customer losses in the second quarter of 2011. Whereas Sprint reported: “net additions of 442,000 improved by 68 percent sequentially driven by best ever quarterly churn performance of 1.69 percent, a Nextel postpaid recapture rate of 60 percent and the continued strength of iPhone sales. Sprint recorded nearly 1.5 million iPhone sales in the second quarter with 40 percent going to new postpaid customers.”
T-Mobile USA currently has 33.2 million customers and sits as the nation’s fourth-largest carrier. MetroPCS falls right behind with 9.5 million subscribers as of earlier this year. MetroPCS certainly is not huge by any means, but it does have spectrum and customers in different parts of the country that both carriers could capitalize on—particularly LTE.
Sprint shares fell this afternoon after rumors came out.
Due to being a big pre-paid player with Boost and Virgin, Sprint could also benefit with MetroPCS’ place in the pre-paid market in different regions.
We will keep you update on the latest.
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