Morgan Stanley bumped up pricing on its $125 million term loan for Clearwire Corp. that launched at the end of June. Pricing was flexed up to LIBOR plus 8% from LIBOR plus 6 3/4%, according to a banker. The maturity of the loan was also increased from two years to three.
Clearwire also received a $600 million injection of cash from Intel Capital, the venture capital investment arm of Intel Corp. Clearwire is selling its subsidiary NextNet Wireless, an OFDM-based non-line-of-sight wireless broadband infrastructure equipment provider to Motorola.
The company is in the same boat as Iridium Corp. when it comes to leaving a bad taste in the mouths of investors. Both are mobile satellite services that originally had trouble developing a customer base due to malfunctions with their satellites. Iridium's $235 million covenant-lite deal, led by Lehman Brothers and Morgan Stanley, was also repriced this week (see story, page 1). Calls to a Clearwire spokeswoman were not returned. A spokeswoman from Iridium declined comment.