Sony is delaying by three months the targeted closing date of the 17.5 billion yen ($153.2 million) sale of its battery business to Murata (see 1610310044), the company said in a Wednesday announcement. Murata and Sony “are continuing the necessary procedures” to complete the sale, but “in light of the current review status of the required regulatory approvals,” the new goal is to close the deal by early July, Sony said. “The rescheduled target closing date remains subject to the receipt of the required regulatory approvals and other conditions.”

Consumers generally don't seem interested in wireless offerings from cable operators, Macquarie analyst Amy Yong wrote investors Sunday. Citing a proprietary Macquarie survey of 100 consumers, Yong said 66 expressed disinterest in such an offering. A wireless acquisition is inevitable, she said, with likely scenarios being Verizon/Charter Communications or some T-Mobile combination with cable. Seventy-three percent of those surveyed said the most they would spend for a Comcast- or Charter-branded service was less than their current wireless bill, with 72 percent naming savings as the biggest persuader that could get them to switch from a current provider. Given the Sprint and T-Mobile price wars, Macquarie said, "We believe the barriers to entry remain high for new players." Half said the biggest hurdle to switching to a Comcast- or Charter-branded service is perception of network quality, Macquarie said, calling the Verizon mobile virtual network operator agreements "somewhat of a Catch-22: on the one hand, it will alleviate fears of network quality, but on the other, it would enable a competitor."

Pandora has no objection to and takes no position on foreign-owned Corvex Master Fund's petition for declaratory ruling to be allowed to own up to 14.99 percent of the music streaming company, they said in a joint filing posted Thursday. Corvex is based in the Cayman Islands but is controlled by U.S. citizens, Corvex's petition said (see 1608120061). A declaratory ruling that allowed Pandora to buy a Box Elder, South Dakota, radio station included a condition that the FCC must grant approval for foreign entities that want to acquire more than 5 percent of the company. Corvex wants to buy 9.99 percent but wants the FCC to pre-approve up to 14.99 percent. Another Cayman based company, Matrix Master Fund, is also seeking a stake in Pandora (see 1612210063).

Time Warner shareholders will vote Feb. 15 on the proposed $108.7 billion purchase by AT&T Feb. 15, TW CEO Jeff Bewkes said in an earnings call Wednesday, saying the regulatory process continues and the deal is expected to close later this year. He said HBO passed 2 million over-the-top subscribers in the U.S. and launched OTT offerings in Spain, Brazil and Argentina last year. Bewkes also said there will be a growing number of partnerships with OTT services that offer HBO. He said Turner is "an anchor tenant" on the various virtual multichannel video programming distributors that have been launched, and also will be on Hulu's upcoming service. Turner CEO John Martin said virtual MVPDs DirecTV Now, Sling and PlayStation Vue are gaining subscriber traction, having close to 2 million subscribers in aggregate. Warner Bros. CEO Kevin Tsujihara said it sees big growth opportunities in China via a subscription VOD partnership with Tencent and the creation of local language content. He also said Warner is making "a lot of progress" on launching its own premium VOD offering, with a big driver being an alternative distribution route for middle-market films such as adult dramas that increasingly are challenged in standard theatrical releases. TW said it finished the year with revenue of $29.3 billion, up 4 percent, with growth in HBO, Turner and Warner Bros.

SoftBank is exploring many options for subsidiary Sprint, said Wells Fargo analyst Jennifer Fritzsche Wednesday in a research note. She cited SoftBank Chairman Masa Son’s comments that day in a financial results presentation, in which Son said the company’s many options include buying or selling with T-Mobile or a different company. The comments prompted some to ask if Sprint is a seller, Fritsche said. “We don't know the answer but it is hard for us to see Softbank taking a minority position in a combined entity given the momentum in Sprint is only just being seen, in our view (even in a period of limited capital spending),” the analyst wrote. “In any negotiations, Sprint would be in a position of strength given the significant spectrum asset value to any potential combination.” Last week, Sprint Chief Financial Officer Tarek Robbiati said the carrier may need a transaction to get the size to compete with AT&T and Verizon (see 1701310046).

LeEco can't predict when its Vizio acquisition will be completed, LeEco spokesman Greg Belloni emailed us Tuesday. LeEco's position remains the same as it was at CES, Belloni said: "The deal review is still in progress, but we don't have a date to share yet.” When LeEco announced July 26 it would pay $2 billion cash to own Vizio as part of its master plan to bring its “ecosystem” of smart TVs, content and cloud services to North America, it said it expected to close the deal in about six months (see 1607260066).

Dish Network's asset swap with EchoStar (see 1701310064) should make Dish less reliant on EchoStar and make its pay-TV business fully self-sufficient except for leasing of satellite transponders, Moody's analyst Neil Begley wrote investors Wednesday. The deal -- which has Dish picking up assets including spectrum and EchoStar's stake in Sling TV -- also makes Dish "much more attractive" for a merger/acquisition or some other combination, Moody's said.

The FTC said it granted an early termination of the premerger notification waiting period for Oracle’s buy of internet traffic service Dyn, allowing the deal to proceed. The Hart-Scott-Rodino Act requires companies engaged in large mergers and acquisitions to submit to a waiting period during which DOJ and the FTC can review the deal for antitrust issues, the commission said. Oracle said in November it planned to buy Dyn in a bid to extend its cloud computing platform (see 1611210047). Dyn's DynDNS service experienced distributed denial-of-service attacks in October that resulted in outages or latency for many major websites in the U.S., including Netflix and Twitter (see 1610260067 and 1611160051). Oracle didn’t comment Tuesday.

Harris Corp. agreed to a $690 million cash sale of its government IT business to Veritas Capital, the private equity firm said in a Friday news release. The Harris business serves NASA and other government customers. The deal needs regulatory review and is expected to close Q2, Veritas said.

Cisco’s proposed acquisition of application-performance monitoring company AppDynamics for $3.7 billion would give customers “the instrument to get insight into their applications all the way from the customer down to the code,” said Rowan Trollope, general manager-Cisco’s IoT and applications business group, on an investor call Wednesday. Visibility into the performance of apps running on Cisco’s infrastructure “has never been more critical to running their business,” he said. AppDynamics CEO David Wadhwani said the company’s technology can be deployed across private and public clouds, and enterprises are moving toward hybrid cloud models. Companies need a monitoring system that “sits above all of that for the next generation of IT operation,” he said. AppDynamics technology can give customers unified monitoring across multiple clouds, including public and private environments, he said, and customers can host data in its environment or their own. The data residency offering is critical for regulatory and compliance requirements, Wadhwani said. The company collects “trillions” of metrics for its customers every month. For Cisco, making sense of data can help its customers understand how a networking bottleneck translates to “somebody sitting in the checkout cart with a spinning hourglass,” said Trollope. “Being able to connect those dots hasn’t really been possible.” Cisco has been hearing from customers that they want more access to that kind of data, he said. Trollope envisions a world based on “systems of intelligence,” where “you rely more on automation and you rely more on the machine to make the decisions in real time.” The company with "the most richly aggregated, correlated, real-time data set" will be the one with the platform for the “enterprise of the future,” he said. The deal is expected to close in FY 2017 Q3 subject to customary approvals. Cisco's Q3 ends on April 30. Wadhwani will remain after the deal, with his firm becoming a new software business unit in Cisco's IoT/Applications business reporting to Trollope, Cisco said Tuesday.