The merger between Sprint and T-Mobile may be doomed but it won’t be because T-Mobile decided to spurn Sprint and accept a competing offer from French carrier Iliad. Bloomberg is reporting that T-Mobile is planning to turn down Iliad’s proposal to buy the “Uncarrier,” which presumably means that it would prefer to stick to its original plan to merge with Sprint.
Iliad shocked the telecom world when it made a former offer to buy T-Mobile, even though the French carrier’s own market cap was significantly below the $16 billion market cap that T-Mobile currently commands. The Wall Street Journal, which first reported news of the merger proposal, said that Illiad has garnered an “Uncarrier”-like reputation of its own in France and “has sparked a fierce price war in France’s mobile-telephone market via its cutthroat rates.”
However, given that Iliad apparently only offered $15 billion while Sprint is offering a much more robust package worth $32 billion, it’s not surprising that T-Mobile will tell the French carrier “thanks but no thanks.”
