According to a regulatory filing Sprint has reduced their previous 53.7% share in Clearwire to 49.8%. The reason? Investors think Sprint views Clearwire as a subsidiary, something they obviously don’t want because if Clearwire gets into financial trouble, which is very likely, then Sprint would be negatively impacted. “Sprint is proactively providing protection and flexibility with respect to its debt agreements and eliminating ongoing investor concerns about any potential cross-default risk,” said Scott Sloat, a spokesman for Sprint. Considering that Sprint is dependent on Clearwire for their 4G network, it’s in their best interest to make sure that they stay afloat. It’s been suggested that by the end of this year an announcement will be made concerning the switch from WiMAX, the current wireless technology that powers Clearwire, to LTE, the competing technology that practically every other operator in the world is using. Such a move would not only make Clearwire more competitive with what Verizon offers today, and what AT&T will offer tomorrow, but it’ll let them take advantage of a larger ecosystem of devices.
Sprint has outlined their vision to improve their network over the next 3 to 5 years and it involves replacing their current architecture that requires separate equipment for each spectrum band that they operate on (800 MHz, 1900 MHz, and 2.5 GHz via Clearwire) to multimode cell towers that make full use of fiber optics to enable higher speeds and less signal loss. Making such an upgrade isn’t going to be cheap, and Sprint needs to borrow money. The decision to reduce their share in Clearwire to less than 50% also helps Sprint look more attractive to lenders.
We’ll see how Sprint and Clearwire continue to evolve with time, but right now they’ve got bigger things to worry about than what investors thinnk of them. The whole T-Mobile AT&T deal is what the entire wireless industry will be keeping an eye on.
Update: Slight (major?!) misunderstanding. Sprint now owns 49.8% worth of voting stock, down from 53.7%. Their equity stake hasn’t changed.