There’s still some potentially massive deals to come in 2017 that may not have even been imaginable in 2016.Call it the Trump bump for tech M&A.
Now President-elect Donald Trump is signaling with his transition appointments and general pro-business stance that a lot more combinations may be acceptable.
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Further fueling merger mania, Trump is also widely expected to work with the Republican majority in Congress to slash the tax on corporate overseas profits. Companies like Apple (AAPL, +0.20%) and Microsoft (MSFT, +1.04%) have accumulated hundreds of billions of dollars in overseas profits that can’t be brought back to the United States without a 35% tax. Trump could slash the rate to 10%, providing the biggest tech companies with a lot of dough to make deals.
The most talked-about potential 2017 deal revolves around T-Mobile, the third-largest wireless carrier and the company that has added more subscribers over the past few years than the rest of the industry combined. Not only could Sprint (S, -1.11%) dream of buying T-Mobile (TMUS, -0.75%) under Trump, but big cable companies like Comcast (CMCSA, +1.32%) or Charter Communications (CHTR, +0.75%), which plan to enter the wireless market next year, may also be bidders. If the bidders want to go after a smaller target U.S. Cellular (USM, -0.91%) could be in play, as well.
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In the era of Trump, it seems many more deals are within the realm of possibility—even ones the President-elect himself has once opposed.
Source: https://www.cnet.com/news/donald-trump-tech-telephone-taxes-tariffs-mergers-net-neutrality/