Contact: Ben Kolada, Thejeswi Venkatesh
After failing to sell its T-Mobile USA subsidiary last year to AT&T for $39bn, Deutsche Telekom has pivoted from trying to exit the T-Mobile business to pushing it even deeper into the US market. The company announced on Wednesday that T-Mobile USA has reached a merger agreement with low-cost competitor MetroPCS in an intricately structured deal.
MetroPCS’s shareholders will receive $1.5bn in cash and 26% of the combined company. While that looks straightforward at first glance, the deal is structured as a reverse acquisition.
MetroPCS will pay its shareholders $1.5bn in cash (it ended the second quarter with $2.3bn in its treasury) and halve the number of shares outstanding by performing a 1-2 reverse stock split. MetroPCS will then acquire all of T-Mobile’s stock in exchange for a 74% stake in the combined company, leaving MetroPCS’s shareholders with a 26% holding. Though MetroPCS is technically the surviving entity, it will assume the T-Mobile name and will continue to trade publicly in the US.
The combined company is projecting 2012 pro forma combined revenue of just shy of $25bn. For comparison, the US’s third-largest cellular provider, Sprint, is expected to put up about $35bn in sales this year.
A bit of irony here is that analysts expected that the previously planned AT&T-T-Mobile merger would reduce competition and increase prices. However, in announcing their merger, T-Mobile and MetroPCS repeatedly claimed that the combined company would be a ‘value-focused’ provider – a pretty way of saying that it would be a low-cost carrier.
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