Sprint, T-Mobile merger expected after September

T-Mobile and Sprint have been supposedly close to a deal for some time now. But now, according to Reuters who spoke to people familiar with the matter, the merger will not occur before September.

In June, Japan’s SoftBank Corp, which controls Sprint, and T-Mobile owner Deutsche Telekom AG agreed to terms of a deal, which has Sprint paying around $40 per share for T-Mobile, which values T-Mobile at nearly $32 billion.

As Reuters notes, Sprint is very keen on making sure that all parts of the deal are flawlessly done, likely knowing that their company may be financially dead if the merger does not go through and they are forced to hand over spectrum and billions to T-Mobile.

Although SoftBank Chairman Masayoshi Son has argued that a merger would give the merged companies leverage to compete against the two dominant rivals, he continues to face an uphill climb in convincing US regulators who turned down a AT&T/T-Mobile merger because they believed that the country was better off with four national wireless carriers.