Japanese carrier SoftBank’s may have to wait a little longer to get its money back from the Sprint acquisition. According to the company’s CEO Masayoshi Son, it will take some time for Sprint turnaround. Here’s what he said in an interview with Reuters:
It took around a year after SoftBank bought Vodafone (before) we reached the No. 1 position of net gains in subscribers. It takes time to get devices ready and prepare services and the network .. At the very least you need half a year or a year. And for anything substantial you need one or two years.
Sprint has been losing customers left and right, and is now in position where it needs all the help it can get. Japanese carrier could, perhaps, bring some cool devices it’s selling in the Land of the rising Sun to the U.S. and/or offer higher subsidies to the users to get more of them to switch networks.
In any case, looks like SoftBank is in the U.S. for the long run, and it will take some time to convince existing AT&T and Verizon Wireless customers to hop over to Sprint’s bandwagon. As usual, the clear winner this deal will be end-users, who’ll get to benefit from lower prices and better deals. Yeah, we tend to think that the future looks promising for the U.S. mobile sector.