Sprint shares have soared more than 17 percent this week as word spread that it plans to make a bid for rival T-Mobile US this summer — but regulators appear dead set against such a deal, two Washington DC sources familiar with the situation told The Post.
“I don’t see any prospect of it going through,” one source close to the situation said. “It’s dead.”
Regulators are skeptical of such a merger, a second source said of the talked-about tie-up.
Sprint, the No. 3 wireless carrier, has seen its shares rise 17.5 percent this week, to $8.73 on Thursday, as Masayoshi Son, the CEO of Japan-based Softbank, which owns 80 percent of the company, was reportedly eying a June or July bid.
T-Mobile’s shares are up 12.6 percent, to $31.65, near a 52-week high.
In January, Sprint angered FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler when a story appeared in the Wall Street Journal about a proposed Sprint-T-Mobile deal the morning Sprint was scheduled to meet with Wheeler to discuss the possible bid, a third source said.
Wheeler believed Sprint planted the story and was trying to pressure him, the source added.
This week, Sprint’s CEO and CFO met with buy- and sell-side analysts separately explaining why it lost 364,000 net customers in the quarter.
The executives left both meetings before they could take the predictable questions about renewed merger talks, a source at one of the meetings said.
If there were merger talks, this would be the right time for Sprint to get the news out there.
Sprint rival T-Mobile reported Thursday that it added more than 2 million net new subscribers in the first quarter, well more than any of its peers.
A good deal of those new subscribers likely came from Sprint.
The FCC is set next year to start selling government-owned spectrum, and part of its rationale is telcos can just buy spectrum on the open market, instead of acquiring each other and reducing the number of national industry players from four to three — or less.
Neither Sprint nor SoftBank spokespeople returned calls for comment.