Dana Cimilluca

Facebook said it would buy Kustomer, a startup that specializes in customer-service platforms and chatbots, part of an effort by the social-media giant to help companies use its platforms to do business. Though terms weren’t disclosed, people familiar with the matter said it would value New York-based Kustomer at a little over $1 billion. Closely held Kustomer, whose technology takes conversations from different channels and puts them on a single screen, was valued at $710 million in a private funding round roughly a year ago, according to PitchBook.

Sprint and T-Mobile have agreed on new terms for their merger, as the wireless carriers race to close the deal. The parties will improve the exchange ratio in the all-stock deal for T-Mobile’s parent, Deutsche Telekom AG. Originally, 9.75 Sprint shares were to be exchanged for each T-Mobile share. Under the revised deal, SoftBank Group, which owns more than 80% of Sprint’s common stock, will exchange the equivalent of 11 of its shares for each T-Mobile share.

The boards of Sprint and T-Mobile US struck a $26 billion merger that, if allowed by antitrust enforcers, would leave the US wireless market dominated by three national players. Under the terms of the deal, T-Mobile will exchange 9.75 Sprint shares for each T-Mobile share. T-Mobile parent Deutsche Telekom will own 42% of the combined company and Sprint parent SoftBank Group will own 27%. The remaining 31% will be held by the public. Deutsche Telekom would also control voting rights over 69% of the new company and appoint nine of its 14 directors.

Qualcomm agreed to buy NXP Semiconductors NV for $39 billion, adding the top supplier of automotive chips to the San Diego (CA) company best known for designing smartphone chips. The agreement represents the biggest semiconductor deal ever, eclipsing Avago Technologies Ltd.’s pact to buy rival Broadcom Corp. for $37 billion, and behind only Dell Inc.’s $60 billion acquisition of EMC Corp. among pure tech deals. The deal values NXP at $110 a share, which represents a 34% premium over where NXP shares traded before The Wall Street Journal reported on the talks Sept. 29. Including debt, the deal is worth $47 billion.

NXP’s position in the fast-growing automotive-chip market was seen as a motivation for the deal because analysts say Qualcomm wants to supply its chips for self-driving cars. The combined company is expected to have annual revenue of more than $30 billion. The deal will reshape Qualcomm, pushing the company deeper into the process of making chips and expanding its product line beyond mobile devices. While Qualcomm derives most of its revenue from designing and selling chips, the company earns more than half of its profits from licensing its wireless patents to nearly all makers of mobile phones. NXP, which became a bigger manufacturer through the purchase in 2015 of Freescale Semiconductor, owns seven factories in five countries that turn silicon wafers into chips. Besides those plants, known as fabs, NXP operates seven facilities that package and test chips before they are sold.

Two months ago, AT&T Chief Executive Randall Stephenson stopped by Time Warner Chief Executive Jeff Bewkes’s offices in New York for a lunch of salmon, while musing about the increasing convergence of the media and telecommunications industries. During their lunch, Stephenson surprised Bewkes by suggesting that AT&T buy Time Warner, apparently. Bewkes said it wasn’t for sale, but at the right price he would consider an offer, apparently, signaling that a deal was possible.

Stephenson walked away with his mind swirling with the possibilities that Time Warner’s premium content—top brands such as HBO, CNN and Warner Bros.—could bring to the streaming video service he was trying to build. “If you were ever going to do something like this, this is the content you’d like to use as an anchor tenant,” he said. From that point forward, things proceeded at breakneck speed, culminating in the biggest deal of the year as AT&T announced it was buying Time Warner for $107.50 a share—a 36% premium to where its stock was trading before the news of a deal started to trickle out during the week of Oct 17.

French upstart telecommunications company Iliad has made an offer for T-Mobile US in a bold bid to counter by Sprint for the fourth-largest wireless carrier in the US. Iliad announced that it offered $15 billion in cash for 56.6% of T-Mobile US at $33 a share.

Iliad said its offer for T-Mobile US, which is majority-owned by Deutsche Telekom AG, "should not raise any antitrust issue in light of the competition rules given that Iliad is not present in the United States."