Sprint CFO Robert Brust has confirmed via Reuters that the carrier cannot complete the purchase of the remainder of Clearwire shares owned by the cable company partners when responding to analyst queries regarding the short-term direction of the company due to lack of capital.
"The path that’s probably likely is that we’ll continue to infuse some equity (investments) over the coming years and maybe some way down the road to take control of it.". "An imminent move on that would just be very expensive.".
While Sprint owns 55% of the current Clearwire venture, 45% of the venture is split between Intel, Google, Time Warner and Comcast. This follows reports that Sprint is considering a venture with T-Mobile in order to resolve the short-term issues being experienced by Clearwire as well as offering T-Mobile USA a 4G network platform, which it currently does not have.
