Dish Network, the satellite pay-tv company, has decided it wants to buy Sprint Corp and has offered $25.5 billion for the beleaguered third-place wireless carrier. It is offering $7 a share, or about $4.76 a share in cash and about $2.24 in Dish stock. That’s 13 percent or about $5.4 billion higher than the $20.1 billion offered by Softbank of Japan.
The cash component of Dish’s proposal is an 18 percent premium over the $4.03 per share implied by the SoftBank proposal while the equity portion represents approximately 32 percent ownership in the combined Dish/Sprint versus SoftBank’s proposal of a 30 percent interest in just Sprint, Dish claimed in a press release. Dish CEO and chairman Charlie Ergen said:
“The DISH proposal clearly presents Sprint shareholders with a superior alternative to the pending SoftBank proposal. Sprint shareholders will benefit from a higher price with more cash while also creating the opportunity to participate more meaningfully in a combined DISH/Sprint with a significantly-enhanced strategic position and substantial synergies that are not attainable through the pending SoftBank proposal.”
Dish is trying for a complete makeover from its slow growing pay-TV business and has been acquiring spectrum to build a nationwide LTE network, though from the looks of it, it will take it a long time to actually roll out the network. It recently asked the FCC for a four year extension to build out its network.
Here is the Dish website where its outlines the entire proposal and have explained its bid in detail.

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