US DTH giant Dish Network is still looking to acquire or team up with a wireless carrier such as T-Mobile, the company’s chairman and founder Charlie Ergen said. Ergen, who is taking over as Dish CEO from Joseph Clayton, set to retire at the end of…
US DTH giant Dish Network is still looking to acquire or team up with a wireless carrier such as T-Mobile, the company’s chairman and founder Charlie Ergen said.
Ergen, who is taking over as Dish CEO from Joseph Clayton, set to retire at the end of March, said during an earnings conference call on Monday that the company doesn’t have everything in terms of assets and “might be an acquirer” in the years ahead.
The senior exec also expressed a revived interest in number four player T-Mobile US, which Dish had been looking to acquire last year. In 2013, it also bid for T-Mobile’s larger rival Sprint, which was eventually bought by Japanese telco Softbank.
“T-Mobile is a company we think highly of,” Ergen said. “It’s hard not to be impressed with what they’ve been able to accomplish in the past few years.”
During T-Mobile US earnings call on 19 February, T-Mobile CEO John Legere described Dish as “a great opportunity, both for the country and for possibly T-Mobile.”
However, Ergen stressed that there might be equally impressive companies, in or outside the wireless business that may want to be connected to the cloud.
The company, which lost 79,000 pay-TV subscribers year-on-year, has been under pressure to acquire, partner or strike a network-sharing deal with another wireless carrier to launch LTE services with its satellite spectrum.
The group is also considering selling or leasing spectrum to other players, Ergen said, explaining that these are two of a dozen options it is looking at.
“There are people both in industry and outside of industry that are interested in this industry and particularly the spectrum and I think there will be a lot of conversations over the next few months,” Ergen pointed out.
Dish’s joint bids with NorthStar Wireless LLC and SNR Wireless LicenseCo in the US’ recently-closed AWS-3 auction are currently being reviewed by the FCC.
The Colorado-based satellite operator won 702 of the 1,614 licences up for auction after making US$13.3bn worth of bids.
However, it is only supposed to pay about US$10bn for those licences because it bought them through designated entities that qualify for a 25% discount aimed at small businesses. This strategy, and the fact that the FCC allowed it to take place, drew criticism from the likes of AT&T, which called for the regulator to eliminate or reform joint bidding agreements.
“The Dish entities’ bid-stacking conduct distorted this market data,” the company wrote in an ex-parte analysing the auction results. “Virtually all of the unfair advantages the Dish entities were able to gain through gaming the joint bidding rules arise from the fact that there was, as a practical matter, a single bidding entity acting through three separate applicants.”
In a recent note, New Street Research analysts suggested that Dish’s spectrum could be worth as much or more to the company if they deployed it rather than selling it.
“The prices paid for spectrum in the AWS-3 auction imply a value for Dish’s spectrum of $50BN ($107 / share). We would further argue that this value is a floor: AWS-4 may be worth more in a sale due to its larger channel widths and we think it may be worth far more if Dish deployed it under a wholesale model,” New Street Research’s Jonathan Chaplin said.
Dish posted annual revenues of US$14.6bn in 2014, up 5.3% from US$13.9bn in 2013.
