We recently reported that Dish Network had outbid Japanese wireless carrier SoftBank to purchase the controlling stake of Sprint, but now, it seems the bidding war has become a a little heated.
As MobileBurn reports, at a recent press conference, SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son called Dish’s offer “incomplete and illusory.” Perhaps more shockingly, he called Dish CEO Charlie Ergen an “amateur to our mobile industry.”
Ergen responded that his company didn’t have experience in the satellite industry before it joined either, and was doing just fine.
“We’re offering a higher price,” argued Ergen. “That’s just math. We are an American company, and the modernization of Sprint’s network will have to be done from the U.S. You have to climb the towers here, and you’ll have to have U.S. employees who speak English. Operations command control will be in America. That’s good for jobs. It doesn’t mean that the other guys are bad. It’s just that we have an advantage.”
The claim that non-English speaking employees would be operating everything was unsubstantiated. Non-english speaking employees could be a better fit to run some of Sprint’s operations, for all we know. His words could be interpreted a number of ways. One could take it to mean that SoftBank wouldn’t have any English-speaking employees, or at least, not enough to successfully run a company with such a high percentage of the U.S. mobile market share. It’s a somewhat offensive statement no matter how you slice it.
Sprint has already formed a committee to discuss Dish’s proposal, which will decide who it wants to take to the spring prom.
