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Canaccord Genuity Morning Coffee on Apple (AAPL): An Apple a Day Can’t Keep T-Mobile Away

March 22, 2011 9:12 AM EDT
AAPL Hot Sheet
Rating Summary:
    49 Buy, 5 Hold, 0 Sell

Rating Trend: = Flat

Today's Overall Ratings:
    Up: 19 | Down: 16 | New: 82
Canaccord Genuity Morning Coffee on Apple (Nasdaq: AAPL): An Apple a day can’t keep T-Mobile away.

Canaccord analyst says, "Apple continued to track higher on Monday, as market watchers suggested the company may be a big winner in AT&T’s (NYSE: T) bid to buy T-Mobile from Deutsche Telekom (NYSE: DT). According to Apple Insider, AT&T’s offer will not only create America’s largest mobile carrier, but also the largest U.S. iPhone carrier, by adding 33.7 million T-Mobile subscribers to AT&T’s network of about 95.5 million, for a total of about 130.0 million users. The web site noted the deal will effectively expand Apple’s iPhone to three of what were the top four U.S. carriers when it arrived in 2007: Apple already brought its popular smartphone to Verizon (NYSE: VZ) earlier this year, leaving Sprint (NYSE: S) as the only major U.S. carrier without the ability to offer the iPhone. During a conference call on Monday discussing the proposed deal, AT&T President and CEO Ralph de la Vega confirmed that T-Mobile’s customers will indeed get access to an industry leading portfolio of devices, which would include those from Apple, Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) and RIM (Nasdaq: RIMM). But some heeded Vega’s comments with a dose of scepticism, suggesting there is no guarantee that T-Mobile subscribers will get the iPhone, pointing to technical barriers and contractual issues. Gigaom, for one, observed that T-Mobile’s network doesn’t run on the common spectrum used by AT&T and other global GSM networks. Subtle differences between the networks mean that even though unlocked iPhones will work on T-Mobile, as of right now, there’s no way for those iPhones to operate using 3G (instead, iPhone users are limited to the slower EDGE protocol). To correct this, after the acquisition AT&T plans to use T-Mobile’s AWS spectrum for its Long Term Evolution Network and transition T-Mobile subscribers over to AT&T’s current 3G networks. Yet Gigaom cautioned investors that this is a long way off: AT&T and T-Mobile still have extensive regulatory hurdles to jump through in getting the deal approved, and if/once it happens, there will probably have to be some renegotiation of the existing deal between Apple and AT&T."


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