Sprint-Clearwire: Competitive Advantage—If All the Cooks Can Work Together
By Tricia Duryee - Wed 07 May 2008 07:51 AM PST
What is most important is that Sprint (NYSE: S) and Clearwire (NSDQ: CLWR) don’t get bogged down with administrative headaches—the proverbial problem of having too many cooks in the kitchen. For now, the companies are betting the opposite—together they are stronger and expect to have a competitive advantage in 4G (in comparison to LTE which is still in development, but has been recently backed by many operators as their next evolutionary step). Clearwire expects to reduce capital and operating expenditures by leveraging Sprint’s existing infrastructure, such as cellphone towers, fiber network and IT support. The new Clearwire will have a lot of financial strength, a ton of spectrum, and a headstart with Clearwire already having more than 400,000 subscribers and Sprint also starting its network build-out. The company expects to grow aggressively with the goal to cover between 120 million and 140 million people in the U.S. by the end of 2010. Of course, Sprint already has a very detailed blueprint of how not to do this—the merger of Sprint-Nextel.
Posted in: Companies, Operators, SprintNextel, Money, VC M&A, Mergers & Acquisitions, Technologies, WiMax
