A Deutsche Telekom plan to merge with its subsidiary T-Mobile US reportedly hit an obstacle, prompting the German operator to decide against making a formal offer for now.

Bloomberg reported Deutsche Telekom faced opposition from its works council and trade unions, which the news outlet stated account for 50% of supervisory board seats.

The news outlet reported Deutsche Telekom was interested in a merger in April. It became the majority stakeholder in T-Mobile US in 2024 and now has close to a 53% stake.

Bloomberg noted Deutsche Telekom could still bring an offer later.

Last month, Bloomberg reported activist investor Elliott Investment Management was pressing Deutsche Telekom to drop the plan, having “built a sizeable stake” in the company.

Deutsche Telekom steadily accumulated T-Mobile US shares in recent years and its former German unit chief Srini Gopalan is now CEO of the latter.

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T-Mobile US CEO Srini Gopalan (pictured) shut the door on a network deal with SpaceX during a Q3 earnings call, telling analysts he sees no reason for an MVNO with the space company.

Gopalan said the operator’s MVNO philosophy has not changed: its criteria includes whether a deal opens a new addressable market, distribution channels or capabilities.

The executive and T-Mobile have long maintained satellite is a complementary product so there is no case for a satellite MVNO.

Gopalan said he does not see an MVNO adding to physical AI and edge efforts for which the operator is building out its standalone (SA) 5G capabilities and moving towards 6G.

“If we’re talking about SpaceX as a customer, or us being a customer of them, that’s a purely commercial agreement,” he said, adding: “I see no room for an MVNO with SpaceX”.

MVNO questions came in the wake of reports SpaceX is seeking access to at least 80,000 US cell sites for Starlink Mobile.

Gopalan said satellite broadband was generally inferior to T-Mobile’s fixed wireless access (FWA) service outside some remote areas, with additional limitations including beam size.

He sees little reason to combine satellite and FWA, noting two-thirds of T-Mobile’s FWA customers are in dense urban areas where it still sees substantial room to grow using fallow network capacity.

“So, we don’t really see a synergistic opportunity with satellite providers”

“I’m very happy to look at a resale arrangement…but an MVNO is a wholly different thing”.

Verizon CEO Dan Schulman also recently ruled out an MVNO with SpaceX and AT&T CEO John Stankey played down the threat SpaceX might pose.

Q3 numbers
T-Mobile’s net income rose 27.3% year-on-year to $3.5 billion on revenue of $23.5 billion, up 7.4%.

Service revenue grew 6.2% to $19.3 billion and post-paid service revenue rose 9.3% to $16.2 billion.

T-Mobile no longer reports wireless customer additions as a separate metric, but stated it added 274,000 net accounts, down 30.8%.

Post-paid account churn was 1.09%, up from 0.97%, attributed to more broadband-only accounts which churn more, and the temporary effect of monthly plan changes.

It had 34,974,000 post-paid accounts compared with 33,979,000 a year earlier. Average revenue per account rose from $149.44 to $155.73.

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