Well, at least Deutsche Telekom is probably happy to finally get rid of their stupid adventure in North America. They bought for 51 billion dollar eleven years ago, they are selling now for 39 billion dollar — all things considered probably not a bad deal.
While they overpaid (in the tech boom who didn't?), to be fair T-Mobile USA has generated billions in profits annually for a while which eases the pain a bit. Plus they're getting a decent chunk of AT&T, which should be in a really good place with T-Mobile out of the way. Mostly I think this was so they didn't have to spend the capital for a full LTE network upgrade, which would be quite an outlay.
Hm - Wikipedia tells me Deutsche Telekom bought what was to become T-Mobile USA in 2001 for $24B. After inflation, that's around $30B in 2011. Where is the $51B figure coming from?
Edit: So, I checked where that 51 billion is coming from. The German T-Mobile International article quotes 39.4 billion Euro and references the 2001 annual report, page 131. Here it is (2.4MB PDF monstrosity and German): http://www.download-telekom.de/dt/StaticPage/47/29/gb_d_komp...
The relevant passage (German): „Am 31. Mai 2001 erwarb die Deutsche Telekom je 100 % an der VoiceStream Wireless Corporation, Bellevue, und der Powertel Inc., Bellevue, zu einem Gesamtkaufpreis von 39,4 Mrd. € inklusive einer Cash-Komponente von 4,9 Mrd. € und einer von der Deutschen Telekom bereits im September 2000 getätigten Investition in Vorzugsaktien von VoiceStream in Höhe von 5,6 Mrd. €.“
That passage basically says that they bought 100 percent of VoiceStream and Powertel for together 39.4 billion Euro.
Well, we are still no closer to finding out what caused the discrepancy — maybe the Wikipedia article is simply wrong?
This is a massive discrepancy - wonder where it's coming from...
edit: the $24B figure was introduced into Wikipedia in July 2007: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=T-Mobile_USA&d... and not challenged since. On the other hand the main T-Mobile article gives a $50.7B figure with a citation. I [citation needed]-ed the $24B claim, let's see where it goes.
