Sprint and T-mobile could merge as early as 1 April

The long gestating merger deal between the United States’ third and fourth largest telecommunications companies is close to completion.

A new amendment to their agreement has set out terms by which the deal could be completed as early as 1 April of this year, with the new company retaining the T-Mobile name.

That amendment has been born out of the relatively poor performance of Sprint since the deal was first signed, while T-Mobile recently beat estimates for its quarterly results. Consequently, for Sprint’s owner SoftBank will receive one share of T-Mobile for every 11 Sprint shares, up from one for every 9.75 initially.

John Legere, the current CEO of T-Mobile, said: “Today’s announcement is another significant step forward toward finally closing this transaction! Throughout this journey, T-Mobile and Sprint have been singularly focused on one thing: building a supercharged Un-carrier that will offer U.S. consumers a broad and deep nationwide 5G network, more choice and greater competition. We are now on the threshold of achieving our goal.”

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The new T-Mobile’s ownership is expected to be constituted 43% by Deutsche Telekom, 24% by SoftBank and 33% by public shareholders. SoftBank was originally going to have 27% to Deutsche Telekom’s 42%.

“With today’s agreement in place, we are now turning our attention toward our goal of closing this transaction and creating the New T-Mobile as early as April 1, 2020,” said Mike Sievert, COO and President of T-Mobile and set to be CEO from May 1, 2020.

T-Mobile US, which is owned by the german company Deutsche Telekom, first made its intentions clear in 2017, but was held up by a number of legal wrangles. The final hurdle is yet to be cleared, with approval still pending from a number of bodies including the California Public Utilities Commission