DISH Makes offer to buy Sprint (Rescinded)

They do have to approve it. But sprint can get everything else approved and setup for the vote. I think that They know SoftBank is gonna up the offer at the last minute and that way the shareholders will vote yes and dish won't have a chance to up their offer


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Actually, don't the shareholders have to approve the SoftBank offer, or disapprove it? I mean, the board can't do the deal either way without a shareholder vote, right?
exactly... no sane shareholder is going to approve an offer that's 25% less than today's market price.
 
What a kick if both fell thru, and then the share price fell, and the whole carnival started all over again!
 
The shareholder will vote for whats gonna make them the most money. As of now.. Short term dish long term SoftBank.


Posted from my iPhone.

Hmmmm. If Dish pulls off what they're trying, there's a ton of money coming their way. The SoftBank way is business as usual.
 
There is no money coming until the debt dish is racking up to pay for sprint is paid back. Sprint hasn't turned a profit in the last 6 years. SoftBank pays off sprints debt and puts money into the company to build out and grow. Yes dish has a "plan" but they still won't have the money they need without borrowing it. Which keeps sprint in the same boat it is in now.


Posted from my iPhone.
 
There is no money coming until the debt dish is racking up to pay for sprint is paid back. Sprint hasn't turned a profit in the last 6 years. SoftBank pays off sprints debt and puts money into the company to build out and grow. Yes dish has a "plan" but they still won't have the money they need without borrowing it. Which keeps sprint in the same boat it is in now.


Posted from my iPhone.

Why does everyone think Softbank has a mountain of cash? They are out selling bonds just as fast as Dish working to raise cash for the Sprint purchase.

http://www.foxbusiness.com/news/2013/05/20/softbank-plans-yen400-billion-retail-bond-issuance/

TOKYO – Softbank Corp. (9984.TO) is planning yet another record-breaking sale of retail bonds to Japanese investors, seeking to raise around Y400 billion, The Nikkei reported in its Tuesday morning edition.
Coming as early as next month, it will mark the biggest issuance ever conducted by a nonfinancial Japanese company -- a record the telecommunications group itself set in March at Y300 billion.
Including the new sale, Softbank will have raised more than Y1 trillion through debt offerings this year. The proceeds will go toward its bid for third-ranked U.S. mobile phone carrier Sprint Nextel Corp. (S), as well as for redeeming existing bonds.

1 Trillion Yen is about 10 billion dollars in new debt that Softbank is racking up for this deal. They are working on another 10 billion in financing for their 20 billion dollar bid. Dish will actually have less debt since they will be paying a lot less cash and giving shares in the new merged company.
 
If I were a Sprint stockholder, I'd be a lot more excited at the prospects for Dish to make me money down the road than SoftBank. A risk, yes, but that is the nature of investing. Business as usual hasn't been working that well for them- why would they expect more of the same to be better?

I believe it was posted earlier than Dish was generating $3B in cash a year. I'm not concerned about that debt, since Charlie Ergen clearly isn't.

 
Seems like Softbank wants to grow the business by lowering prices while Dish will most likely keep the prices up but offer people more features.
 
Seems like Softbank wants to grow the business by lowering prices

As a customer of one of their cheaper prepaid brands who can barely avoid it, I vote for lowering prices with Softbank, if that's the choice. ;)

However, I am not sure it's a question of directly lowering prices with Softbank versus offering more features with Dish. I think it's a question of Softbank expanding infrastructure, improving infrastructure, and having a stronger more competitive cell phone network that increases overall competition in the market (indirectly lowering prices, perhaps) versus Dish taking over, being financially unable to make those infrastructure expansions and improvements, while using large chunks of bandwidth for television purposes, further clogging an already clogged network to the point where it's unusable and collapses under it's own weight, leaving us with an even less competitive cell phone market place.

If Dish wants to get involved in the cell phone business, great, build some towers. Give us five main networks backbones plus all the small companies that rent from them, instead of what would ultimately wind up being only 3 if Dish buys Sprint and sinks it. Sprint also has many of the larger differently branded prepaid carriers like Boost and Virgin Mobile on their network right now. You let Verizon and ATT have a duopoly over most of the country and watch what happens to prices and service. T-Mobile will just have to price things a little below them and will do fine. If we don't want to take a step backwards and take cell phones away from a lot of people, we need someone who is going to keep improving an expanding Sprint and it's subsidaries and partners as a cellular service company, and that's Softbank.

Charlie has said he believes the pay TV business as it exists today is failing, and he's attempting to buy up things at random in a desperate bid to not be primary a pay TV company when the you know what hits the fan. That may be in his best interest, but it's not necessarily in anyone else's. Sprint is at a point where it can either step up and start competing effectively with Verizon and ATT, or it can collapse into irrelevancy and possibly bankruptcy. I think a Dish acquisition puts it on the latter road, at least as a cell company. Charlie is likely mainly buying it for spectrum he can use to offer home TV and Internet and will start cutting off third-party cell carriers and raising rates on the owned brands to clear space. It's in America's best interest to have the Japanese company own Sprint, ironically.

Also, I think Sprint employees will be happier working for Softbank. Dish employee surveys show very low job satisfaction levels. If I worked for Sprint and a Dish deal went through, I'd put my resume online the same day hoping to bolt before things got bad.
 
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As a customer of one of their cheaper prepaid brands who can barely avoid it, I vote for lowering prices with Softbank, if that's the choice. ;)

However, I am not sure it's a question of directly lowering prices with Softbank versus offering more features with Dish. I think it's a question of Softbank expanding infrastructure, improving infrastructure, and having a stronger more competitive cell phone network that increases overall competition in the market (indirectly lowering prices, perhaps) versus Dish taking over, being financially unable to make those infrastructure expansions and improvements, while using large chunks of bandwidth for television purposes, further clogging an already clogged network to the point where it's unusable and collapses under it's own weight, leaving us with an even less competitive cell phone market place.

If Dish wants to get involved in the cell phone business, great, build some towers. Give us five main networks backbones plus all the small companies that rent from them, instead of what would ultimately wind up being only 3 if Dish buys Sprint and sinks it. Sprint also has many of the larger differently branded prepaid carriers like Boost and Virgin Mobile on their network right now. You let Verizon and ATT have a duopoly over most of the country and watch what happens to prices and service. T-Mobile will just have to price things a little below them and will do fine. If we don't want to take a step backwards and take cell phones away from a lot of people, we need someone who is going to keep improving an expanding Sprint and it's subsidaries and partners as a cellular service company, and that's Softbank.

Charlie has said he believes the pay TV business as it exists today is failing, and he's attempting to buy up things at random in a desperate bid to not be primary a pay TV company when the you know what hits the fan. That may be in his best interest, but it's not necessarily in anyone else's. Sprint is at a point where it can either step up and start competing effectively with Verizon and ATT, or it can collapse into irrelevancy and possibly bankruptcy. I think a Dish acquisition puts it on the latter road, at least as a cell company. Charlie is likely mainly buying it for spectrum he can use to offer home TV and Internet and will start cutting off third-party cell carriers and raising rates on the owned brands to clear space. It's in America's best interest to have the Japanese company own Sprint, ironically.

Also, I think Sprint employees will be happier working for Softbank. Dish employee surveys show very low job satisfaction levels. If I worked for Sprint and a Dish deal went through, I'd put my resume online the same day hoping to bolt before things got bad.

What you said! :)


Posted from my iPhone.
 
As a customer of one of their cheaper prepaid brands who can barely avoid it, I vote for lowering prices with Softbank, if that's the choice. ;)

However, I am not sure it's a question of lowering prices with Softbank versus offering more features with Dish. I think it's a question of expanding infrastructure and improvements and having a strong more competitive network that increases overall competition in the market (indirectly lowering prices, perhaps) versus Dish taking over, being financially unable to make those infrastructure expansions and improvements, while using large chunks of bandwidth for television purposes, further clogging an already clogged network to the point where it's unusable and collapses under it's own weight, leaving us with an even less competitive cell phone market place.

If Dish wants to get involved in the cell phone business, great, build some towers. Give us five main networks backbones plus all the small companies that rent from them, instead of what would ultimately wind up being only 3 if Dish buys Sprint and sinks it. Sprint also has many of the larger differently branded prepaid carriers like Boost and Virgin Mobile on their network right now. You let Verizon and ATT have a duopoly over most of the country and watch what happens to prices and service. T-Mobile will just have to price things a little below them and will do fine. If we don't want to take a step backwards and take cell phones away from a lot of people, we need someone who is going to keep improving an expanding Sprint and it's subsidaries and partners as a cellular service company, and that's Softbank.

Charlie has said he believes the pay TV business as it exists today is failing, and he's attempting to buy up things at random in a desperate bid to not be primary a pay TV company when the you know what hits the fan. That may be in his best interest, but it's not necessarily in anyone else's.


I think you are very mistaken by saying Charlie is "buying things in a desperate bid." You don't become a billion by making desperate bids. I'm pretty sure most of his decisions are very well thought out. Charlie made it very clear many years ago where this industry is going and he's been right for the most part so far.
 
What I suspect Dish may be planning is to use the huge amount of bandwidth from Clearwire that is in undesirable frequencies (i.e. has trouble penetrating buildings) to do rural fixed broadband. If you had a small cell antenna on the outside of the house, LTE advanced could really deliver great service to a lot of rural areas. He could do it without having to charge by the GB, yes he may have to throttle data hogs, but there is a huge amount of this spectrum.

The more desirable frequencies could be used for Sprint's LTE phone network.

I think Dish sees a far bigger market in home LTE broadband than handset, it would mesh well with Dish's strong rural DBS presence. Right now his only solution is satellite which has a lot of problems. This would not play well in large cities since population density is too high and the LTE bandwidth would get too divided up. Cable would have that internet locked up anyways. If he could offer 20mbit fixed wireless service to the 20 million or so homes that cannot get anything more than 3mbit DSL if they are lucky, it would be a huge market. A 20mbit connection bundle with Dish TV and a Sprint wireless phone would be a great triple play option that essentially would have a monopoly on a huge number of homes.

Another unmentioned item that Dish has is a huge nationwide fiber optic network. Dish bought a lot of capacity when it was cheap. What better way to back haul all the LTE towers? Dish brings back haul and spectrum to this deal that Softbank does not have.
 
My best friend is an entrepreneur who started buying "stray" licenses in the early 90's. He has made at least a couple million or more from leasing most of them to Sprint. Right now, he is sitting on several more that Sprint made low ball offers for, and he is sitting tight on. All I can say is...he is all for the Dish plan, not Softbank's.
 
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This can be debated 1,000,000 different ways but at the end of the day we just have to wait and see what happens. I want DISH to win so the control stays here in America but I'm also pulling for SoftBank because they are one of the biggest cell providers in the world and I think they can do more for Sprint than DISH can. DISH has great ideas but I don't think they will be able to make them reality. They need to go for someone more like T-Mobile. They are making money and DISH will need all they money they can get to do what they want to do. Sprint needs money and that is something that will kill both company's for a long time if DISH wins.


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Maybe Dish is biting off more than it can chew? Seems like things will be interesting either way this will go. I can see Softbank getting Sprint then tower space getting lease to Dish to provide their services with a triple play offering to all Dish and Sprint customers perhaps similar to how they bundle with Frontier.
 
They need to go for someone more like T-Mobile. They are making money and DISH will need all they money they can get to do what they want to do. Sprint needs money and that is something that will kill both company's for a long time if DISH wins.

The problem is that T-Mobile does not have the spectrum holdings of Clearwire. This is what Dish wants.

http://www.fiercebroadbandwireless....ectrum-holdings-softbank-alignment/2012-10-28

IDC's report notes there are numerous LTE spectrum bands available in the United States, including 700 MHz, cellular 850 MHz, PCS 1.9 GHz and AWS 1.7GHz/2.1GHz, which are all shared by a number of operators. "While there are advantages to having a combination of spectrum bands to address coverage and capacity requirements, the downside is that there is significantly less bandwidth within each individual band, creating limitations on throughput," said IDC.

Clearwire, however, possesses spectrum in a single bandwidth, the 2.5GHz to 2.6GHz frequency band known as 3GPP Band 41. The carrier holds in excess of 130 MHz on average, including 160 MHz on average in the top 100 markets. "As a result, Clearwire has the capability to generate much greater capacity and better network performance by virtue of a significantly fatter pipe vis-à-vis competitors," said IDC.

Read more: Clearwire touts spectrum holdings, Softbank alignment - FierceBroadbandWireless http://www.fiercebroadbandwireless....s-softbank-alignment/2012-10-28#ixzz2UJOFl1hK
Subscribe at FierceBroadbandWireless

2.5GHZ - 2.6GHZ is not nearly as desirable for handsets because of the building penetration problems of the high frequencies. But, with an outdoor antenna LTE-Advanced promises huge bandwidth. If they used 100MHZ for downlinks: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LTE_Advanced

Within the range of system development, LTE-Advanced and WiMAX 2, can use up to 8x8 MIMO and 128 QAM. Example performance: 100 MHz aggregated bandwidth, LTE-Advanced provides almost 3.3 Gbit peak download rates per sector of the base station under ideal conditions. Advanced network architectures combined with distributed and collaborative smart antenna technologies provide several years road map of commercial enhancements

The 130-160+MHZ block that Clearwire owns could provide multi gigabit speed in rural areas. Of course it is shared between everyone in the cell sector, which is why I said above 20mbit would be a reasonable per house division. You and 150 neighbors could download 20mbit at once. In rural areas this would be excellent coverage.
 
Charlie talked about why some of these other companies failed. He said they didn't have a wide range since they used devices inside the home to receive signal and they didn't have the personnel to do do installations outside. By merging with Dish, not only is there more spectrum but there is a large base of retailers that have the knowledge and ability to perform installations and service.
 

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