In a press release this morning, Sprint has announced that it will purchase publicly traded MVNO Virgin Mobile USA for $483 million factoring in the value of Sprint’s 13.1% ownership stake along with completely retiring Virgin Mobile’s current debt load of $248 million with a further reduction to $205 million on September 30th.
Sprint will bring the Virgin Mobile executive team directly under corporate control with current CEO Dan Schulman reporting directly to CEO Dan Hesse and Boost CEO Matt Carter reporting to Schulman, signaling a shift in corporate hierarchy.
Both Boost Mobile and Virgin Mobile will continue to operate as normal, with customers experiencing minimal consumer side changes. Most of the changes will come from the retail/wholesale side as the purchase enables Sprint to offer Sprint products directly to Virgin Mobile distributors and dealers.
For its part, Virgin Mobile launched as one of the first MVNOs in the country on Sprint in 2002 before going public and becoming an independent company in 2007. Virgin Mobile subsequently purchased the failed Helio MVNO from SKTelecom for $39 million in 2008 which included all assets and branding along with launching the latest Helio handset in the Ocean 2 in February and its first 3G 1xEVDO handset in the Shuttle later in the year.
Engadget said that it is a done deal and sprint purchased vm for 483million. Good for them! They are doing a lot of cool things.
I wonder how many will this add to the 49.1 million.
The transaction isn’t finalized yet.
Where the hell did Sprint find $483 million?? I thought they were still bleeding customers and losing money.
Virgin has about 4 or 5 million subscribers
Does the 49 million customers include boost customers?
Sprint includes Virgin Mobile and Boost Mobile customers in their 49 million count. This is because Sprint fully owns Boost Mobile, and was already co-owning Virgin Mobile with Virgin.
Sprint also includes other smaller MVNOs that they wholesale to in that tally.
@ Christopher Price
Sprint does NOT include boost mobile nor Virgin mobile to it’s costumer count due to the fact that Boost Mobile is a pre paid service meaning that costumers are not forced to sign 2 year contracts, meanwhile it also does not include Virgin mobile for the same reasons as Boost and because sprint only owned 13% of the company.
Chris is right and Cris is wrong, still think they should’ve bought iPCS. Even with this they still lost 1M subs the past quarter
I still feel that Sprint will buy out iPCS before they’re forced to divest portions of the iDEN network next year. I don’t believe that this acquisition precludes that possibility. I also think that Sprint should at least explore to feasibility of a merger with US Cellular which also had a down Q2. Obviously Sprint’s last merger didn’t go as well as hoped, but a merger with USCC would be a lot less painful due to the fact that both carriers utilize CDMA. I imagine somebody will eventually gobble them up, so why not try to merge before at&t or someone else devours USCC?
That would be less of a merger than the Nextel one based on subscribers alone, makes since though being they missed out on the Alltel train. I could finally use my phone on the “L” here if it did happen, they still should’ve went after before VM
Cristian Ruiz, as Don Louie has said, you’re wrong. Sprint does include affiliates and all MVNOs in the 49 million tally. This has been well-documented and confirmed by Sprint.
It doesn’t matter the ownership percentage… if a call goes to a customer across Sprint’s CDMA or iDEN networks, they’re considered a customer in the 49 million tally. You may not agree with that (and I can understand that), but that is how Sprint gets to 49 million.
48.8M now
HEllo! I have Virgin mobile. I am very excited that Sprint purchased Virgin mobile. I love Virgin mobile I’ve had it for almost 5 years. I do think that they needed a pick me up…: )