It's been a long and winding road to get there, but Sprint has officially completed its acquisition of Clearwire, making the third-largest wireless provider in the U.S. a bit bigger. The merger agreement was first announced in December of last year, but Clearwire shareholders only got around to approving the transaction Monday, July 8, at a special meeting, with the transaction closing the following day.
When Sprint made its initial bid in December, it already owned 50 percent of Clearwire and was willing to pay $2.2 billion for the remaining half. Normally, there would be no reason for this to be dragged out, except that DISH, looking for spectrum to power a new nationwide wireless service to rival Sprint, came seemingly out of nowhere to present a much more attractive bid of $5.15 billion.
Sprint then upped its proposal in May to $3.40 per share, beating out DISH's bid by 10 cents per share. DISH, however, seemed willing to do whatever it took to obtain Clearwire, so it upped its bid by another one dollar per share, amounting to a $6.3 billion valuation.
Out of context, this may seem a little dramatic but, as always, this bidding war was really a war over spectrum. DISH received FCC approval late last year to use the 40MHz AWS spectrum on which to build its 4G mobile broadband network, but the company lacked the spectrum holdings to roll out nationwide service — which is where Clearwire comes in.
Sprint, meanwhile, would have lost access to Clearwire's 4G spectrum, which could have been a potentially fatal blow for the carrier. It's no surprise, then, that Sprint went as far as to sue in order to stop DISH's bid from going through.
However, it doesn't seem to be Sprint's legal maneuvers that led to its success today, but rather its final bid: $5.00 per share in cash, amounting to a $14 billion valuation.
Edited by
Ryan Sartor 
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