Bloomberg Law Brief: Antitrust Issues Surround Merger (Audio)

and T Mobile. They speak with Jennifer Ree, senior litigation analyst for Bloomberg Intelligence, sketch out if you would quickly first just the state of the mobile phone market. Where do Sprint and T Mobile fit? What share of the

market do they have? That sort of thing? Well, right now, essentially in the US, they're just really four big wireless players, and I think most people know that with Verizon is the biggest at around thirty eight percent based on Bloomberg data, which which isn't precise, but it's close a T and T at about market share, T Mobile at about and Sprint at about eleven percent, and then leaves about ten percent for a lot of smaller non national type players.

Had things in the marketplace changed a lot since the previous attempt to merge the companies was rejected, or is it more about the change in administrations? You know, I think things have changed, but a lot of things have also stayed the same. About what was problematic in the past, some of those factors will remain problematic today. And of course the administration is changing too, and there's been a

lot of speculation about that. And I think historically Republican administrations do tend to be easier on deals than democratic ones, but not in an extreme manner, really only on the fringe, just sort of the slightest bit. There isn't really a big difference in the evaluation that that the antitrust regulators will go through to determine whether a deal might be harmful to a market is the same no matter what

political party you come from. So, as you laid it out, Sprint and T Mobile are a distant third and fourth in the market, and and I think one can anticipate if they go forward with this, they will argue that we will be a stronger competitor to Verizon and a T and T um Is that an argument that you see as having in the potential to have some legs to it. Greg, I think it's one of the best

arguments they have. I think it's a good argument, and I think it's it's likely, you know, a good argument for them to go in with, and and if they have any chance at all, it's it's probably based on something like that. I think the problem here is that

they it's an uphill climb. They walk in, you know, with the odds against them, because as a threshold matter, agencies will ask the d J will ask, well, what is the concentration in the market, And that's just a matter of math, and they take those market shares, they square them, and they sum the squares, and they look at the difference before the merger and after the merger, and if those numbers exceed that change that difference exceeds two hundred, which it does here in a market that

is deemed to be highly concentrated, which this is automatically, they consider that as a threshold matter, to be a deal likely to cause harm to the market. As Jennifer Ree, senior litigation analyst for Bloomberg Intelligence, speaking at the Bloomberg Student Grosso and Greg Sture, you can listen to Bloomberg Law weekdays at one p m. Wall Street Time here on Bloomberg Radio Now. Among his top legal stories from Bloomberg Law, A federal appeals court has reinstated the six

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