MetroPCS said it will combine with T-Mobile USA...
MetroPCS said it will combine with T-Mobile USA April 30 after the close of business. The Wednesday announcement came soon after MetroPCS’s investors voted in favor of the deal with the No. 4 U.S. carrier. It got the approval from…
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the owners of 80 percent of MetroPCS’s shares (http://bit.ly/14Sz5vc). The carriers have gotten deal approval from the FCC, the Committee on Foreign Investment in the U.S. and the Department of Justice. Shareholders agreed to T-Mobile owner Deutsche Telekom’s final offer, which will give them $1.5 billion in cash and 26 percent ownership in the combined carrier. DT’s final offer also included a lower amount of debt that will transfer to the combined carrier. Leading MetroPCS shareholders had been concerned the level of debt was too high (CD April 12 p11). The merger “is the best outcome for MetroPCS and our stockholders and will maximize stockholder value,” said MetroPCS CEO Roger Linquist in a statement. The transaction “adds valuable tailwind” to T-Mobile’s “Uncarrier” strategy, said DT Chief Financial Officer Timotheus Höttges, to be chairman of the combined company, in a statement. “Together with MetroPCS, we will make considerable improvements to our competitive position with our combined state-of-the-art network” (http://bit.ly/XWVke4). MetroPCS had more than 3.5 million LTE subscribers at the end of Q1 -- 39 percent of its approximately 9 million subscribers, the carrier said (http://bit.ly/ZvSD5s). That’s an increase of 1.2 million subscribers on the carrier’s LTE network since the end of Q4. MetroPCS said it added a net 109,000 subscribers during Q1, slightly less than the 132,000 it added during the same period in 2012. The carrier said Q1 profit fell 7.6 percent to $19.4 million from the year-ago quarter, and sales rose 1 percent to $1.29 billion.