Clearwire’s board of directors has officially accepted Sprint’s increased bid for the remainder of the company Sprint does not already own after months of accepting Sprint’s loan facilities and mulling over a shock competing offer from Dish Network. The $3.40/share offer represents a 15% increase from the previous $2.90/share offer made by Sprint in order to purchase the rest of the company it didn’t already own.
The initial offer for the increased was first made yesterday, with the expectation that it would be accepted as quickly as possible, owing to the fact that Clearwire was already making use of the aforementioned loan facilities provided by Sprint for the beleaguered mobile broadband carrier to continue operations in the short-term. The increase represents a total of $2.5 billion for the remaining stake in Clearwire and was increased in order to appease the remaining shareholder holdouts that were against the initial offer.
The Board of Directors and shareholders are expected to reconvene at the end of the month to formally accept and ratify the increased purchase offer. With the imminent purchase, this puts Sprint in an improved position ahead of the completion of the majority stake purchase by SoftBank later this Summer, a purchase frequently attacked by Dish Network in order to poison the well to serve its own ambitions for a mobile network to utilize its own spectrum holdings and to become a “triple-play” service provider, ambitions that have yet to find a solid foundation outside of constant talk from current CEO Charlie Egren.
