No changes planned at Nextel Partners

Nextel Partners sale is close to being finished, but no changes are expected once the planned sale goes through. The company is very happy with their current operations and don't want to tinker with success.

The purchase of Nextel Partners follows the merger between Sprint and Nextel Communications in August. Since then, Sprint Nextel has acquired several Sprint affiliates, which served specific geographies. Nextel Partners, which has 2.1 million subscribers, was Nextel Communications' only affiliate and the largest of all the affiliates of the combined companies. In 2005, the company had sales of $1.8 billion and a profit of $605.4 million.

The key to their success was finding an under-served niche market and exploiting it. The company was originally asked to become an affiliate of Nextel by Craig McCaw. The company was fortuitous enough to have inserted a clause that stated they'd be purchased at the same time Nextel was. That stipulation has paid off handsomely.