(Bloomberg) — Verizon Communications Inc. is interested in buying back US Cellular Corp.’s stake in its Los Angeles business if the companies can agree on a reasonable price, the chief of Verizon’s consumer division said.
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US Cellular owns a stake in Verizon’s Los Angeles market segment, and Verizon has long been eager to buy it back, Verizon Consumer Chief Executive Officer Sowmyanarayan Sampath said Monday in an interview. He said the company would only strike a deal if the price were right. Sampath declined to say what Verizon would view as a fair price, and it’s not clear whether an agreement will be reached.
“I want to buy that back — I’ve been quite open about it,” Sampath said. “But it has to be at a price that makes sense for us.”
A US Cellular representative declined to comment.
US Cellular parent Telephone and Data Systems Inc. said in a 2016 filing that it held a 5.5% ownership interest in the Los Angeles SMSA Limited Partnership and Subsidiary, with Verizon managing the entity. TDS in an annual report filed April 19 said its investment in the Los Angeles partnership contributed pretax income of $65 million for both 2023 and 2022.
“They got in at the right time back in the day,” Sampath said.
The Wall Street Journal reported last week that Verizon and T-Mobile US Inc. were in talks to buy portions of US Cellular, a carrier with more than 4 million wireless subscribers in 21 states and a market value of $3.86 billion as of Monday’s close.
Over the past few years, rivals AT&T Inc. and T-Mobile have taken greater shares of the US retail wireless market while Verizon’s portion dropped to 35.2% in 2023 from 36.5% in 2021, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. In a bid to restore growth, Verizon’s Sampath has hiked prices and offered add-on perks such as bundled Netflix and Max streaming plans.
Verizon customer losses have eased but not ended. The carrier reported that it shed 158,000 retail mobile wireless subscribers in the first quarter.
(Updates with revenue in the fifth paragraph.)
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