Google plans to sell off stake in Clearwire at a steep loss
It was just under four years ago that Sprint and Clearwire brought together an impressive group of companies as part of a multi-billion dollar partnership to back the WiMAX service provider, but it's safe to say that things haven't quite worked out as planned in the years since. While Clearwire is of course still up and running, its WiMAX-based network has faced an uphill battle against other carriers' LTE-based networks, which even Sprint and Clearwire itself have been switching to. Now one of those partners, Google, has decided to offload its stake in Clearwire at a steep loss. According to an SEC filing, Google will be selling off its shares at a price of $1.60 each, or just over $47 million in all -- that's compared to the $500 million it spent to invest in the company. Not surprisingly, that has caused Clearwire's stock to take a bit of a tumble. As of this writing, shares in the Washington-based company were down almost six percent.
