Dish Having Moved Upstairs, Clearwire Picks Sprint

In the ongoing wireless M&A soap opera, Clearwire has finally made up its mind to stick with the original plan, err the original Sprint buyout plan that is.  Today they sent out a letter to shareholders endorsing Sprint’s offer to buy the company and its spectrum holdings for $2.97 per share in advance of the company’s upcoming vote two weeks from tomorrow.  

Dish had also made an offer for the company at a higher price, and had gotten some shareholder support looking to at least make Sprint sweeten their bid.  However, when the prospects for Dish’s offer for Clearwire started to dim, they quickly looked onto plan B (or is it plan C or plan D now?) and made a bid for Sprint itself.  That bid remains unresolved of course, but Softbank seems to be following the same script as Sprint did.  In the meantime, Clearwire’s board apparently concluded it had waited long enough to make the decision everyone knew it would make eventually although perhaps not at what price.

There have also been offers for pieces of Clearwire spectrum resulting from talks with as many as 37 potential buyers according to the email.  But given Clearwire’s capital constraints it has been obvious that the piecemeal option was an unlikely one.  And Sprint was in a position to torpedo anything that wouldn’t be in its best interest, which kind of put a damper on alternative scenarios just like with the Dish offer.

 

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Categories: Mergers and Acquisitions · Wireless