T-Mobile US Inc. and Sprint Corp., the third- and fourth-largest mobile carriers in the U.S., Sunday announced they’ve agreed to merge.

Sprint agreed to be acquired by T-Mobile in a $26.6 billion all-stock deal that will see the two companies combine forces to push forward with a rollout of next-generation 5G wireless network technology.

Under the deal, the combined company will retain the name T-Mobile and T-Mobile Chief Executive John Legere and his management team will run the operations. Sprint shareholders receiving 0.10256 T-Mobile shares for each Sprint share they own, the equivalent of $6.62 a share based on T-Mobile’s closing price of $64.52 of Friday, according to Bloomberg.

After the deal’s completed, assuming that happens, Japanese telco giant SoftBank Group Corp., Sprint’s largest shareholder, will hold 27 percent of the combined company. T-Mobile’s biggest shareholder, Deutsche Telekom AG, will own about 42 percent of the combined company. Other shareholders in both companies will hold the remainder of shares.

Combined, the two companies will have roughly a 30 percent market share on the U.S. wireless market, with $74 billion in annual revenue and 70 million wireless subscribers. Verizon Communications Corp., the market leader, last reported $88 billion in revenue in 2017 and 111 million subscribers, while second-place AT&T Inc. booked $71 million in revenue on 78 million subscribers.

A deal between the two companies first emerged in 2014 but was subsequently abandoned after the U.S. Federal Communications Commission and Justice Department voiced concerns about the deal on competition grounds. The second attempt is likely to face similar concerns, but as was noted when a potential deal again surfaced last May, both companies are hopeful that the Trump administration may be more open to approving the deal.

Appealing to the Trump administration is key to the deal obtaining approval and T-Mobile has come out firing. It promised in a press release that the combined company would “invest up to $40 billion in its new network and business in the first three years alone, a massive capital outlay that will fuel job growth at the new company and across related sectors. This is 46 percent more than T-Mobile and Sprint spent combined in the past three years.”

Addressing competition directly, the statement then noted that “this combination will also force AT&T, Charter, Comcast, Verizon and others to make investments of their own to compete, driving billions more in accelerated investment.”

For tech observers, the deal is yet another merger deal driven by SoftBank and its chairman Masayoshi Son as the Japanese giant, which seemingly has investments in just about everything tech-related, continues to attempt to consolidate its portfolio companies into profitable investments. Sprint has been unprofitable for a number of years. In the ride-hailing market, it was SoftBank that forced Uber Technologies Inc. to sell its China business to Didi Chuxing Technology Co. in January 2016 and more recently its Southeast Asia business to Grab Taxi Pte. Ltd. in March.

Measuring just how big a player SoftBank is in respect to tech is difficult to pin down. CNBC reported in August that the company had invested $126 billion in other companies through its various divisions. But that’s the figure it has invested, not the current valuation of its investments — which could conceivably be worth anywhere from $500 billion to $1 trillion on paper today.

Photo: Juergen Lehle/Wikimedia Commons