Bloomberg Intelligence: Trump Looks to Save Spirit (Podcast)

For T, the key issue is not the headline combination itself but the regulatory overhang it creates across the entire US telecom stack. Any credible path to a Deutsche Telekom–T-Mobile structural transaction would force investors to reprice control-premium optionality, capital allocation, and FCC/DOJ approval risk across peers; that usually widens the discount on strategic assets before it ever tightens. The first-order beneficiary is probably not T so much as tower, backhaul, and fiber infrastructure names if a larger operator uses merger talk to justify network densification and overlapping integration spend over the next 12-24 months.

The market may be underestimating the asymmetry in T’s setup: if the transaction is real, the path to value realization likely runs through a very long approval process with meaningful remedy risk, while if it dies, the stock can give back the strategic premium quickly. That makes the trade less about the headline and more about whether management can sustain a multiple re-rating without near-term hard synergies. A cleaner expression is to own the “picks and shovels” beneficiaries of carrier consolidation rather than the acquirer/target pair themselves.

PM looks like a higher-quality earnings compounder than the market may credit, but the bigger second-order effect is competitive pressure on combustible peers and on nicotine-distribution channels. Strength in smoke-free products should continue to compress the valuation gap versus traditional tobacco, and if the market starts treating PM as a secular growth defensiveness story, multiple expansion can be faster than the underlying volume growth would imply. The main risk is regulatory: any broadening of flavored-product restrictions or tax action would hit the category’s implied durability faster than consensus models assume.