Today's the day that MetroPCS held a big meeting for its stockholders to vote on T-Mobile's proposed merger, and while there's been no official announcement of the results quite yet, it sounds like the deal may have been given the thumbs up. Bloomberg has been told by a MetroPCS spokesperson that the carrier's shareholders have approved the T-Mobile deal. No other details of the vote have been revealed.
The T-Mobile-MetroPCS agreement has already earned all of the regulatory approval that it needed, and so this stockholder vote is the last hurdle that the deal must clear before it can reach completion. The merger originally faced quite some opposition, but T-Mobile parent company Deutsche Telekom recently sweetened its bid for MetroPCS. That led to much of the opposition changing sides, including MetroPCS's largest shareholder, which I'm sure will help to nudge the other investors to vote in favor of the merger as well. Stay tuned and we'll update you with more details on this situation as they're available.
UPDATE: Deutsche Telekom has confirmed that MetroPCS's shareholders have approved of the deal. DT CEO René Obermann described the news as "a major step" for his company," going on to say that the MetroPCS merger is very important to his company because it allows T-Mobile to be "more aggressive" in the U.S.
Now that the T-Mobile-MetroPCS merger has gained the approval of MetroPCS's shareholders, the deal has all of the approval necessary to reach completion. Deutsche Telekom expects that the merger will close on May 1. As part of the deal, MetroPCS's stockholders will receive a cash payment of $1.5 billion along with a 26 percent stake in the new company. The combined entity will go by the legal name of "T-Mobile US." Deutsche Telekom's full announcement can be found right here.