Sprint shareholders approve Softbank merger

Sprint and Softbank are officially approved to merge by Sprint shareholders, the companies announced this morning. According to Sprint, approximately 98 percent of shareholders at today's meeting voted to approve the deal, which represents "approximately 80 percent of Sprint's outstanding common stock" as of late April 2013. Of course, the United States Federal Communications Commission still needs to sign off, though the companies are expecting it to go through FCC approval unscathed by some point in July. The US Justice Department already gave the deal its thumbs up.
Shareholders are expected to receive approximately $7.65 per share (or an option to convert their current Sprint stock holdings to "New Sprint common stock"), part of a $16.64 billion pie. Softbank already owns a 70 percent stake in Sprint, which it purchased earlier this year for approximately $20.1 billion. Should this merger go through as it's expected to next month, Softbank and Sprint will become one. It's kind of like Voltron, but with fewer pieces and a lot more money.
Updated: This post originally noted that the merger still required approval by the US Federal Trade Commission, which is incorrect. We've updated the above post to reflect the correct information.