T-Mobile, Sprint more upbeat on merger nod
WASHINGTON/NEW YORK: T-Mobile US Inc and Sprint Corp believe their foreign owners’ offer to stop using Huawei Technologies equipment will help with the United States clearing their US$26 billion (RM108.8 billion) merger deal, said sources, underscoring the lengths to which Washington has gone to shut out the Chinese company.
Like all major US wireless carriers, T-Mobile and Sprint do not use Huawei equipment, but their majority owners, Germany’s Deutsche Telekom AG and Japan’s SoftBank Group Ltd, respectively, use some Huawei gear in overseas markets.
People familiar with the deal between T-Mobile and Sprint, the third and fourth largest US wireless carriers, said US government officials had been pressuring Deutsche Telekom to stop using Huawei equipment, and the companies believed they had to comply before a US national security panel would let them move forward on their deal.
Both Deutsche Telekom and Softbank were reported to be seeking to replace the world’s biggest network equipment maker as vendor. Now, T-Mobile and Sprint were expecting the US panel, called Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), to approve their deal as early as this week, said the sources.
The sources, however, cautioned that negotiations between the two companies and the US government had not been finalised yet, and any deal could still fall through.
Several telecom operators in Europe and Australia have said they will exclude the Chinese firm from their fifth-generation (5G) mobile networks.
The pressure on Huawei has already heightened tensions between the US and China over trade. Earlier this month Meng Wanzhou, Huawei’s chief financial officer and daughter of its billionaire founder, was arrested in Canada on a US extradition request. US prosecutors have accused her of misleading multinational banks about Huawei’s control of a company operating in Iran. China has asked for her release.