Sidecut Reports

Close watchers of the nascent U.S. WiMAX market couldn’t help but notice that for the past couple years there has been a strange sort of tension between the largest WiMAX-only gear vendor, Alvarion, and the largest WiMAX service provider, Clearwire. (Like at the recent 4GWE show, where an Alvarion keynote speech about the general state of WiMAX never mentioned Clearwire’s name.) Was it because Clearwire’s exclusive supplier deals with Motorola and Samsung kept Alvarion out of the game? Whatever the cause, it looks like the relationship is starting to thaw a bit with Tuesday’s announcement of an Alvarion deal to supply a Clearwire network launch — in Spain.

Since the network there will use spectrum in the 3.5 GHz band — unlike Clearwire’s U.S. markets, which use the 2.5 GHz band — there was probably room for Clearwire to negotiate with someone other than its current suppliers, without making anyone angry. No matter what this particular deal is worth, for the WiMAX industry as a whole it’s a great thing to have two of the biggest names in WiMAX from the U.S. market (Alvarion has its headquarters in Tel Aviv, but its U.S. presence is considerable) finally working together. If you remember that Ben Franklin quote about hanging together or hanging separately, with big-carrier competition on the horizon hanging together is going to be a necessity if the U.S. WiMAX market is going to survive and thrive.

So much for holding onto its recent stock-price bump — WiMAX gear maker Alvarion took a big hit Wednesday, after its CEO announced his intentions to quit, and after a quarter filled more with promises than revenues.

Tzvika Friedman, president and CEO of Alvarion, said today he didn’t want to lead the company anymore, never good news no matter which way it gets spun. Lumped on top of a $4 million loss for the second quarter of 2009, the bad news was enough to send Alvarion stock down 78 cents a share to $3.96, a 16 percent dive.

Though Alvarion seems poised to take advantage of an apparent building momentum for WiMAX infrastructure spending, it’s not a sign of strength or good strategy when the CEO position is in a state of flux. (As opposed to Clearwire, which handled its CEO change fairly seamlessly this spring.) More as we hear more — or please feel free to add your views to the comments thread.

UPDATE: To clarify our earlier headline, it should be noted that CEO Friedman is not leaving until a replacement is found — the word we are hearing from inside is that “in Israel, everything leaks” so the company wanted to announce the search publicly instead of having to deal with rumors of the CEO leaving. Is this way better?

The recession may not be over, but there appears to be a lot more Wall Street confidence in WiMAX stocks lately. Just looking at three leading firms in the nascent U.S. WiMAX market — Clearwire, Towerstream and Alvarion — you see some significant jumps in market caps over the past couple months.

WiMAX provider Clearwire, as you can tell by this handy chart, was trading at $4.25 back on June 3 but closed July 28 at $8.13 a share, a 91 percent gain. We noticed some crazy activity with Towerstream’s stock a few days ago, and it’s been on a wild ride this week (and it looks like the company pre-announced some earnings info perhaps in an attempt to calm the waters) but it still closed July 28 at $1.64 per share after being at 72 cents a share back on June 3, a gain of almost 128 percent.

And WiMAX gear maker Alvarion seems to be holding onto the big bump it got when it announced its $100 million deal with provider Open Range back on June 16. The stock, at $3.17 on June 3, closed July 28 at $4.74, almost exactly a 50 percent gain. Alvarion is scheduled to report earnings tomorrow, while Towerstream reports on Aug. 5 and Clearwire, who should have some more WiMAX subscription numbers to chew on, reports Aug. 11.