Arik Hesseldahl

Recent Posts by Arik Hesseldahl

What Would T-Mobile Do With $3 Billion? We May Be About to Find Out.

What would T-Mobile do with three or four billion dollars? It’s a realistic question, because that’s the approximate amount it stands to gain when its proposed merger with AT&T fails, as it appears it is going to do, following today’s lawsuit by the U.S. Department of Justice to block the deal.

As reported in March around the time the merger was first proposed, T-Mobile, a division of Deutsche Telekom, stands to gain about $3 billion in break-up fees should the deal fail to close. AT&T would also give T-Mobile certain wireless spectrum that’s not needed for the rollout of its next-generation wireless network.

While AT&T has said it plans to fight the action in court, the sudden move by the Justice Department and the fact that the Federal Communications Commission — which would also have to sign off on the deal — has yet to weigh in on it, make it extremely unlikely that the merger will ever be consummated, says James Ratcliffe, a telecom analyst with Barclays Capital in a note to clients today. He points out that, historically, when they challenge mergers in court, the agencies tend to win about 60 percent of the time.

“We believe that the deal is by no means dead, as the DOJ has stated that the ‘door is open’ for AT&T to propose remedies, but the fact that the DOJ took this strong step this early in the process makes the probability of completion much lower,” he wrote. “We now view the probability of success at 35-40%, down from our previous 75% view.”

One of the primary arguments in the complaint (the original filing is embedded below via Scribd) focuses on government and enterprise customers. Where critics of the deal would charge that the only notable competitors to AT&T and T-Mobile are Sprint and Verizon Wireless, AT&T management would rebut that Leap and MetroPCS are also players. The DOJ complaint discounts that argument, especially with regard to business and government customers. Leap and MetroPCS are really regional players, the DOJ says, and so corporations and government agencies with many offices around the country can only realistically consider national carriers, the number of which would be reduced to three were the deal approved.

“T-Mobile makes its presence felt competing head to head with AT&T and other carriers for a number of accounts, winning business in some cases and often pushing prices lower when it does not,” the DOJ’s complaint reads. “The merger’s elimination of T-Mobile as an aggressive competitor would likely result in fewer choices and higher prices for enterprise and government customers.”

And while the DOJ has drawn its legal line in the sand, it’s not the only agency yet to be heard from. The Federal Communications Commission would also have to sign off on the deal for it to be approved. Its chairman, Julius Genachowski, issued a carefully worded statement that gives a strong hint that it will ultimately oppose the merger. “Competition is an essential component of the FCC’s statutory public interest analysis, and although our process is not complete, the record before this agency also raises serious concerns about the impact of the proposed transaction on competition,” Genachowski said.

In a conference call with reporters today, Harold Feld, the legal director of PublicKnowledge, a telecom advocacy group that has opposed the merger, speculated that the FCC will likely send the matter to an administrative law hearing, which he called “the kiss of death” for mergers. “By the time that procedure would be finished, T-Mobile would have taken its breakup fee and gone and built an entirely new network,” he said.

So on what legal basis might AT&T and T-Mobile fight the case? The DOJ is using some new market analysis techniques that haven’t been used in antitrust cases before, says Barclays’s Ratcliffe. “Traditionally, the DOJ has used regional impact analysis to study the impact of wireless mergers, and it does so here again,” he writes. “In addition, however, the DOJ is also viewing the market as being national, a comparatively new approach, which might be more open to challenge in the courts.”

AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson has promised to fight it, and continued to argue that the deal will bring real benefits to spectrum management nationwide, and create jobs. Deutsche Telekom said it will join the fight, too.

Justice-ATT-TMobile-Complaint

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