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WiMAX IPOs Are on the Way
By Larry Hendrick | December 20, 2006
Business Week carries a story today about two very different companies, looking to make their fortune in WiMax. Both are planning IPOs this next year because both need cash to forward their plans.
Clearwire filed to go public early this year, but withdrew the offer when they decided the money just wasn’t there. Now Clearwire has filed again and will proceed with their offering, looking to raise millions.
On Dec. 18 and 19, two wireless upstarts—NextWave and Clearwire—filed to go public with the Securities & Exchange Commission. Based on their S-1 forms, both companies hope to make their fortunes on WiMAX, a broadband-wireless technology expected to start making significant inroads in the telecom market next year. Market researcher Gartner Dataquest expects the North American WiMAX services market to swell from 30,000 connections in 2006 to 21.2 million by 2011.
NextWave is another story, as you can see from the included quote, they have no product, no customers, and no resources. I will be surprised if they have a successful IPO, but such surprises have shown themselves before.
NextWave’s WiMAX chips, meanwhile, are still being developed and no commercial product has been announced. And it has yet to conduct its first WiMAX service market trial. Some analysts doubt whether the company has the resources to get the service off the ground nationwide.
I think theirs will go the way of Vonage, opening high and closing low. It is hard to convince people with money to part with it for no plan, although it does happen. We’ll see.
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