Sprint, Amazon, American Tower: Tech Winners & Losers

NEW YORK (TheStreet) -- Shares of Sprint Nextel (S) were losing ground Monday after the company agreed to sell a majority stake to Japan's Softbank for $20.1 billion.

Softbank is snapping up 70% of Sprint by providing $8 billion in new capital and purchasing $12.1 billion worth of Sprint stock at $7.30 per share in cash. The remaining stock will be converted to equity in a new publicly-traded company.

Sprint said it plans to use the proceeds for its Network Vision strategy, which aims to consolidate multiple network technologies into one network, with the goal of "increasing efficiency and enhancing network coverage, call quality and data speeds."

Sprint shares were down 1.5% at $5.64. Clearwire (CLWR), which is partially owned by Sprint, is up more than 16%.

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Amazon (AMZN) shares were up slightly amid speculation the company is looking to acquire part of Texas Instruments's (TXN) mobile chip business.

Israeli newspaper Calcalist reported that Amazon is in late-stage talks with TI about a potential deal for the operations that manufacture the primary chip used in Amazon's devices, such as the Kindle. Amazon is also rumored to be planning to eventually launch its own smartphone. The report said a deal would probably be worth "billions of dollars."

Amazon shares were last quoted at $242.61, up 25 cents, while TI's stock was adding more than 3% at $28.11.

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American Tower (AMT) jumped 4.61% to $75.50 as the Sprint/Softbank deal keeps a strengthened wireless carrier in business.

The other major wireless tower companies, Crown Castle International (CCI) and SBA Communications (SBAC) were seeing strong gains as well.

Interested in more on Amazon? See TheStreet Ratings' report card for this stock.

--Written by Chris Ciaccia in New York

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