T-Mobile Buying Prepaid Provider Mint
T-Mobile announced plans to buy Ka’ena, best known for Mint Mobile, a low-cost prepaid wireless brand partly owned by actor Ryan Reynolds, for $1.35 billion in cash and stock. T-Mobile also gets Ultra Mobile, which offers international calling options and…
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wholesaler Plum. Clearance by the FCC and DOJ likely won’t be a problem, New Street’s Jonathan Chaplin told investors. Mint runs on T-Mobile’s network. “T-Mobile is acquiring the brands' sales, marketing, digital, and service operations, and plans to use its supplier relationships and distribution scale to help the brands to grow and offer competitive pricing and greater device inventory to more U.S. consumers seeking value offerings,” the carrier said Wednesday: “The Un-carrier will also be able to leverage Mint’s industry-leading digital [direct-to-customer] marketing expertise as part of its broader portfolio to reach new customer segments and geographies.” Mint founders David Glickman and Rizwan Kassim are expected to manage the brands, “which will generally operate as a separate business unit,” T-Mobile said. Reynolds “will continue on in his creative role on behalf of Mint.” Reynolds and T-Mobile CEO Mike Sievert appeared together in an announcement on Twitter. “T-Mobile has assured me that our incredibly improvised and borderline reckless messaging strategy will also remain untouched,” Reynolds says in the posting. “I don’t remember the word reckless, Ryan,” Sievert deadpans. Reynolds assured the CEO he had added the word to the contract in crayon.