T-Mobile says French company’s buyout bid is too low

T-Mobile US regards Iliad’s $15 billion bid for a majority stake in the company as too low given its growth prospects, the U.S. wireless carrier’s finance chief said.

Iliad’s proposal was “very inadequate,” T-Mobile chief financial officer Braxton Carter said at an investor conference Wednesday in Boston. “We believe today that we’re undervalued. And we believe that our forward potential is significant.”

Iliad, based in Paris, is left as the only bidder for T-Mobile after Overland Park-based Sprint ended talks about buying the fourth-largest U.S. mobile phone company. Iliad, which last month offered $15 billion in cash for 56.6 percent of T-Mobile, is seeking partners to help finance its bid and allow it to make an offer for a larger stake, sources told Bloomberg News.

“Very rarely do people come with their best bid to start,” Carter said.

Carter was asked at the conference whether T-Mobile could strike a deal to share its voice and data traffic with the Wi-Fi networks of cable companies such as Comcast. Carter said the T-Mobile network is set up to handle Wi-Fi calling and data, and it is a great tool to help manage traffic on the cellular network.

A partnership with a company that has extensive Wi-Fi capability “could be a very powerful value proposition,” Carter said.

Comcast would be a prime prospective partner if T-Mobile needed to boost its network capacity with Wi-Fi, John Butler, an analyst with Bloomberg Intelligence, wrote Thursday in a research note. John Demming, a Comcast spokesman, didn’t return a message seeking comment.

This story was originally published August 14, 2014 at 2:50 PM with the headline "T-Mobile says French company’s buyout bid is too low."