AT&T was the only company to ultimately bid...
AT&T was the only company to ultimately bid to buy Leap Wireless -- and still ended up paying 58 percent more than it initially offered, according to a Leap proxy filing with the SEC released Wednesday (http://bit.ly/167S7do). Leap said it…
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sought bids from six other unnamed companies, which BTIG analyst Walter Piecyk said in a blog post he believes are from Sprint and majority owner SoftBank, T-Mobile US and parent company Deutsche Telekom, MetroPCS and Dish Network (http://bit.ly/1bL5UgI). AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson had previously told Leap in April 2012 the carrier wasn’t interested in buying Leap, according to the filing. Leap and AT&T restarted negotiations early this year, and AT&T initially indicated it was interested in buying Leap at $9.50 per share. AT&T ultimately agreed to pay $15 per share for a total of about $1.2 billion (CD July 16 p1). AT&T may have been willing to raise its bid by so much “given the lack of available spectrum and the early impacts of mobile video adoption from the high speeds delivered by LTE technology,” Piecyk said. “Many investors believe that AT&T is growing increasingly concerned about T-Mobile and wanted a way to attack them more aggressively on the pre-paid front as well as restricting T-Mobile’s access to spectrum while that company’s leverage is too high to launch a competitive and over-priced bid for Leap."