The Sprint And T-Mobile Mega Merger Is Dead And T-Mobile's Stock Is Tanking

Sprint has abandoned its plans to buy T-Mobile, The Wall Street Journal and others are reporting.

Sprint, through its majority shareholder SoftBank, has been in negotiations to buy T-Mobile for the last few months, reportedly for about $40 per share, or about $32 billion.

Bloomberg reports that Sprint will announce a new CEO Wednesday who will replace the current CEO, Dan Hesse.

The merger would've created a carrier large enough to compete with Verizon and AT&T, the two largest carriers in the U.S. in terms of subscribers and revenue by a longshot.

T-Mobile's stock was down over 5% in after-hours trading.

T-Mobile is an interesting turnaround story. The carrier was bleeding subscribers by the end of 2012 when CEO John Legere took over. In 2013, Legere began making several moves to scoop up new subscribers. Since then, T-Mobile started carrying the iPhone, eliminated contracts, and started an offer to pay early termination fees for customers switching over from other carriers. T-Mobile is now the fastest-growing carrier in the U.S.

Meanwhile, Sprint has been taking it on the chin. It's losing subscribers and its network isn't as robust as AT&T or Verizon's.

More to come...