Alvarion Stock Drops 25%; What's Going On?

With the NCAA tournament’s selection fast approaching, I need to speak about a different type of March Madness. WiMax leader Alvarion (ALVR) has gotten absolutely crushed, and that’s is pure and utter madness. Alvarion is trading at $5.65 a share, and the stock has shed 25% since the beginning of the month. Why? What has so dramatically changed in 13 days? The stock is almost 40% down YTD. Yikes.

Colleague Zack Miller had a great post about Alvarion last month, and yesterday he screamed, in a voice heard throughout IOI corporate headquarters, ”They just did a deal in Kenya, what’s going on?”

While I don’t think it’s accountable for all the recent losses in the stock, the impact that the Israel shekel has on Alvarion shouldn’t be dismissed. The greenback getting slammed this week against the shekel coincided with Alvarion stock falling sharply as well. In fact, we highlighted this fact in our last issue of the newsletter. In a recent earnings call, the company admitted that it is hurt by the weak U.S. dollar compared with the Israeli shekel.

If you ask me, whether or not WiMax takes hold in the U.S. is not so relevant. Alvarion is executing its business model quite well in developing nations, and this is a nice little growth business, which I think the market has completely forgotten about.

If you are long-term investor, it may pay to have a look at Alvarion at these levels.

Disclosure: The author’s fund holds a position in ALVR. He has no position in any other stock mentioned as of March 13, 2008.

Comments

[nissua]

I can't understand the price slide. Yes, there is concern (in the US) about the viability of mobile WiMAX. But Alvarion has been plugging along successfully selling fixed WiMAX for regional and even countrywide backbones for years, and that business should continue very nicely. The healthy share price from fall '07 seems more indicative of this company's prospects.

[Mufor9]

Sometimes you just have to let the charts tell the story. Back in
2003 Alvarion took off from 5.01 and ran up to 17.15 where sellers
induced it to make a round trip back to 4.92 in 2006. As dumb luck
would have it, someone was indignant that Wimax was going to rule
the world of telecommunications and the stock price couldn`t see it,
so, indignant ran the stock up back to 15.21 recently where the sellers had another field day. What is going on is that the buyers
of this stock are more excited about the prospects of Wimax than
the insiders of the company because not a single insider has bought
shares in five years. Wimax maybe backbone technology but the
insiders need to show us some backbone and defend some of these
slides.

[AmesTiedeman]

If you can't understand the price slide then do not try to. Buy ALVR. It will go up. This article is correct.