T-Mobile and Sprint officially announce merger plans, new company to be called T-Mobile

After a few weeks of rumors, it’s now official: T-Mobile and Sprint, currently the nation’s third and fourth largest wireless phone carriers, have agreed to merge their operations. The new company will simply be called T-Mobile, and its current CEO John Legere will also be the head of the new company.

This is the third time these two companies have tried to merge. In 2014, Sprint tried to buy T-Mobile, and even announced its plans to make that happen, but that deal fell apart. In 2017, both companies entered internal talks to merge, but ended up not agreeing to terms.

This time, T-Mobile and Sprint finalized their merger agreement. Under this new deal, T-Mobile’s current majority holder Deutsche Telekom will own 42 percent of the new company, while Sprint’s majority owner SoftBank will claim another 27 percent of the new T-Mobile. The merger will be an all-stock deal worth $26 bilion and is expected to close sometime in early 2019.

In his own statement about the deal, Legere claims that the merger between T-Mobile and Sprint will “shift this Un-carrier revolution into overdrive,” stating that adding the assets from Sprint will allow T-Mobile to offer both a broad and deep 5G wireless network nationwide when it is ready to launch. He added that it will also foster more competition for wireless, broadband and video services, “especially in rural America where choices are limited today.”

The deal is not yet confirmed, as it still needs to be approved by each company’s shareholders. It also needs to gain approval of U.S. government regulators. In 2014, the merger was stopped because the Obama administration made statements that indicated it might not approve the deal. This new T-Mobile and Sprint agreement is expected to gain approval under the current Trump administration.