NEW YORK (WiMAX Day). The American WiMAX network services provider Clearwire Corp filed its IPO prospectus with the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) yesterday, with the intention of an immediate listing on the Nasdaq stock exchange under the code CLWR.

According to its offering document, Clearwire plans to sell 20 million shares for between $23 and $25 per share. This would add over $450 million to Clearwire’s coffers, and give the company an enterprise value of well over $3 billion. The IPO will be lead by Merrill Lynch & Co, Morgan Stanley and JPMorgan.

Clearwire says in the documents that it intends to use the proceeds from the IPO to further finance the continued growth and expansion of its business.

Steady subscriber growth
During 2006 Clearwire increased it radio spectrum holdings in America by 79% “from 6.7 billion to 12.0 billion MHz-POPs”, and its international spectrum holdings “from 4.0 billion to 8.7 billion MHz-POPs,” the document states.

The company also launched services in nine new US markets, bringing its total coverage to 32 US markets with 6.6 million people, and total subscribers growing to 206,000 at the end of 2006. Part of this increase is a benefit of new distribution channels with AOL and the specialty electronics retailers Best Buy and Circuit City.

This growth gave Clearwire revenue of $76.4 million for the first nine months of 2006, ending September 30th. From this revenue, $43 million is attributed to access services related to its subscriber base, and the remainder is derived from equipment sales in the equipment company NextNet, which was sold to Motorola in August 2006. For the same period in 2005, service revenue was $4.5 million.

Strategic partners
The previous investors in Clearwire include Intel, Motorola and Bell Canada, which collectively invested over $1.1 billion in the company. These strategic partners are key assets for Clearwire, and the relationship with Intel soon will be more commercial, as Clearwire intends to extend its services beyond its current fixed, portable and mobile service offerings. .

According to the IPO prospectus, Clearwire and Intel “have entered into a strategic collaboration agreement to develop, deploy and market a co-branded mobile WiMAX service in the United States that will target users of certain notebook computers, ultramobile PCs and other mobile computing devices containing Intel microprocessors. Both of the parties have committed to make certain contributions to the development, promotion and marketing of this service, which will be available only over [the Clearwire] mobile WiMAX network.”