Microsoft-Activision
Adobe-Figma
T-Mobile-Mint
I hope the current administration in power cracks down hard on these clearly anti-competitive mergers, as they did with Visa-Plaid.
T-Mobile Reaches Agreement to Acquire Mint Mobile for Up to $1.35B
21–30 of 197 posts
Re: T-Mobile Reaches Agreement to Acquire Mint Mobile for Up to $1.35B
#22Also, did no one from Mint's public relations department review the copy for this announcement before it went live? "Two excited guys, one video"? Seriously?
Re: T-Mobile Reaches Agreement to Acquire Mint Mobile for Up to $1.35B
#23I've been a Mint customer for about 4 years, paying the annual upfront payment, which works out to $15/mo. And shaking my head at those who are paying double or triple that rate on T-Mobile, even though Mint uses the same exact network. In terms of why T-Mobile is making this purchase, I'm pretty sure it's to take out someone who was eating their lunch. I've always found it strange that an MVNO is able to operate on…
Stating you don't plan to increase prices means you are planning to increase prices, but you want to surprise people with it so they don't have time to find an alternative before their next renewal. You also get to control the PR narrative so the news of the price increase is separate from the news of the acquisition, and can lie to the government review board and say that the acquisition won't hurt customers.
Re: T-Mobile Reaches Agreement to Acquire Mint Mobile for Up to $1.35B
#24When I first came to this country as a broke grad student, paying 80$-100$ or joining a family plan with friends, sometimes even strangers, seemed absurd to me. Mint was the only thing I could afford at $15 a month. The data was limited, like 4 GB a month I guess, but I had Wi-Fi everywhere and only needed data for navigation. Good for the founders, they championed MVNO space in some way. Perhaps bad for Mint custome…
T-Mobile is purchasing Mint to fix pricing obviously. I've been fixed at $75 for my fake "unlimited" plan now for about 10 years and switching plans will somehow only make things more expensive... Now ads and shoddy apps eat up my bandwidth at 5G speeds every month so I get throttled when I work hardest on my device. Even though Mint wasn't useful to me, T-Mobile buying them means that monopolies are getting away wit…
Product differentiation for various markets and price discrimination are both common techniques that even a monopoly can use to extract more profit.
They know that not everyone would be able to afford the top tier of service. If Toyota were the only car company, they wouldn't only offer top end Lexus models. They would probably retain the various tiers, and simply try to capture the maximum consumer surplus at each tier.
There's no particular reason why a monopolist would want to remove a cheaper priced but lower functionality service, so long as it is profitable.
By integrating the businesses they might actually be able to find efficiencies and cost savings that make it even more profitable via economies of scale.
Whether those efficiencies end up as consumer savings is a question of how competitive the market is, but I don't see how this would necessarily harm the customer experience.
Might be able to reduce redundant storefronts, headcount, software as a service platforms, etc. Might be able to save money on employee benefits by leveraging larger group policies. They could do all of this while keeping things about the same or better for customers.
The only reason to actually eliminate the lower end of the pricing model is if it is unprofitable. Others would fill the space if they just killed it.
Re: T-Mobile Reaches Agreement to Acquire Mint Mobile for Up to $1.35B
#25Earlier quoted context omitted.
Especially since this so very common in the sports world - Derek Jeter and the Marlins, George W. Bush and the Rangers (back in the day), etc. But, professional sports teams print money. Most of the infrastructure is funded by tax payers. Salary caps (this includes baseball) keep expenditures down. Fans root for laundry, so rationality is out the window. Just look at baseball, you can pull down a healthy profit while…
> Fans root for laundry That's a keeper, thanks!
It's from Seinfeld:
Re: T-Mobile Reaches Agreement to Acquire Mint Mobile for Up to $1.35B
#26Earlier quoted context omitted.
He'd be better off just finding someone rich to front the cash and being the face, much like with Mint
Especially since this so very common in the sports world - Derek Jeter and the Marlins, George W. Bush and the Rangers (back in the day), etc. But, professional sports teams print money. Most of the infrastructure is funded by tax payers. Salary caps (this includes baseball) keep expenditures down. Fans root for laundry, so rationality is out the window. Just look at baseball, you can pull down a healthy profit while…
From "Billions":
> Sports franchises are how we knight people in this country
Re: T-Mobile Reaches Agreement to Acquire Mint Mobile for Up to $1.35B
#27When I first came to this country as a broke grad student, paying 80$-100$ or joining a family plan with friends, sometimes even strangers, seemed absurd to me. Mint was the only thing I could afford at $15 a month. The data was limited, like 4 GB a month I guess, but I had Wi-Fi everywhere and only needed data for navigation. Good for the founders, they championed MVNO space in some way. Perhaps bad for Mint custome…
T-Mobile is purchasing Mint to fix pricing obviously. I've been fixed at $75 for my fake "unlimited" plan now for about 10 years and switching plans will somehow only make things more expensive... Now ads and shoddy apps eat up my bandwidth at 5G speeds every month so I get throttled when I work hardest on my device. Even though Mint wasn't useful to me, T-Mobile buying them means that monopolies are getting away wit…
Related if you can afford it, NextDNS[1] on my mobile device has been a godsend for blocking ads. Literally amazing how much speed it saves when sites aren't loading a bunch of ads / tracking libraries. I use it on my router and mobile devices and it's made a huge difference.
Re: competition being removed, that really sucks. I'm a Google Fi customer which has similar pricing, only downside is that if I switch to an iPhone, the service pretty much becomes useless as you lose access to WiFi calling and hotspots, things that work seamlessly on my Pixel :/
Edit: Apparently Google Fi now supports WiFi calling and mobile hotspots on iPhone as of iOS 13 Hmmmmm, maybe I can switch with no problems now.
Re: T-Mobile Reaches Agreement to Acquire Mint Mobile for Up to $1.35B
#28This is Ryan Reynolds' second company he has sold which he has a "significant stake" in after he sold his Aviator Gin to the big whale, Diageo brands. He's been able to leverage his status and marketing talent to grow those brands significantly. Other actors, athletes also do this, but perhaps he is the most noticeable. George Clooney also sold an alcohol brand to Diageo.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-03-15/t-mobile-....
Re: T-Mobile Reaches Agreement to Acquire Mint Mobile for Up to $1.35B
#29If you're looking for an alternative T-Mobile MVNO Tello.com might be worth a look. I used to use it and it was _cheap_. I ended up moving to another MVNO on Verizon because T-Mobile coverage isn't great around my house but I was happy with the price and service.