UScellular delays stockholders' meeting with T-Mobile deal still awaiting FCC, DOJ approval
Last May, T-Mobile agreed to buy UScellular's wireless customers, stores, and certain spectrum assets belonging to the nation's fifth largest wireless carrier. The transaction will cost T-Mobile some cash ($2.4 billion) and it was assume the responsibility for paying $2 billion in UScellular debt. The deal will give T-Mobile 30% of UScellular's spectrum assets including airwaves in the 600 MHz, 700 MHz A Block, PCS, AWS, 2.5 GHz, and 24 GHz (mmWave) frequencies.
Both sides hope to close the transaction sometime during the middle of this year. The deal adds approximately 4 million subscribers to T-Mobile. The latter also says that a significant number of UScellular employees will be offered a job with the carrier. The transaction still awaits regulatory approval from the FCC and the DOJ.
On Wednesday, UScellular announced that it will postpone its 2025 annual stockholders meeting which was scheduled to take place on May 20th. In a press release, the wireless firm said that the delay was related to the timing of its deal with T-Mobile. The new date and time of the meeting remain undecided and UScellular says that it will release this information as soon as it can.
Because the stockholders' meeting is delayed, UScellular will have to file Form 10-K/A with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to amend its Annual Report on Form 10-K covering the year ended December 31, 2024. The amendment will include certain items that normally would have been part of the Proxy statement disseminated during the stockholder's meeting had it been held on time.
T-Mobile has been on a buying spree dating back to its April 1, 2020 closing of the $26 billion acquisition of Sprint. That deal was done so that T-Mobile could get its hands on Sprint's hoard of 2.5GHz mid-band spectrum which is the "secret sauce" that allows T-Mobile to arguably be called the 5G leader in the U.S. Since the Sprint deal, T-Mobile acquired Mint Mobile and Ultra Mobile.
Based in Chicago, UScellular currently has 4.4 million customers covering 21 states. At the end of last year, it had 4,100 full and part-time employees. Telephone and Data Systems (TDS) owns 83% of UScellular. As of year's end 2024, T-Mobile had 129.5 million customers which breaks down to:
- 104.3 million postpaid customers
- 25.2 million prepaid customers
- 6.4 million High-Speed Internet customers
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