From The Stock Masters
Craig’s senior year at Stanford he took control of his family’s cable company and ever since then he and his brothers have been setting the pace in the world
of cable and cellular industries. The McCaw brothers acquired MCI’s cellular wing in 1986 then sold the cable company to Cooke Cablevision (now part of Comcast). In 1994, the McCaw brothers sold McCaw Cellular to AT&T for $11.5B. The company was renamed AT&T Wireless. AT&T Wireless was sold to Cingular in 2004 to become the nation’s largest wireless carrier, and today they all are under the AT&T (T) umbrella. So now, its Clearwire (CLWR), and today the IPO is not going as well as planned. Clearwire raised $600M with a 24 million share offering of Class A stock. The shares were sold at $25 each, at the top end of a forecast range of $23 to $25. All eyes are on McCaw and his new wireless broadband internet service provider, so can he do it again? Clearwire’s product and technology is amazing, but how quick will it catch on? Everyone that wants broadband has it. So can he offer it for a better price and wouldn’t a wireless setup be cool? Well, we would all like that, but are we going to make the switch, how easy is that for everyone, is it cost effective? Will the God of the Cell phone become the God of Wireless Internet? Time will tell. Jon Ogg’s take on the IPO…