Reston-based NII Holdings Inc. to dissolve

Announcement comes 10 months after selling final operating unit

Published October 13, 2020 by Sydney Lake

Reston-based NII Holdings Inc. announced last week it has filed a petition in a Delaware court to dissolve the company 10 months after it divested its one remaining operating unit, which sold wireless communication services under the Nextel brand to América Móvil.

On Dec. 18, 2019, NII Holdings closed the $948.5 million sale of its Brazilian operations to América Móvil. As part of the sale, $30 million of the net sale proceeds due to NII was placed in an 18-month escrow account to secure NII’s indemnification obligations.

NII formed in 1995 as an international business unit of Nextel Communications Inc., a wireless service operator that is now a wholly owned subsidiary of Sprint Corp. In the early 2000s, Nextel owned a stake in NII Holdings, which once had millions of subscribers in Latin America and quarterly earnings of more than $1 billion. The end of NII’s luck came following Sprint’s acquisition of Nextel in 2013, which disabled some of the company’s services.

In September 2014, NII Holdings filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy after losing 77,000 subscribers in the second quarter, bringing its subscriber base to 9.4 million. Then in 2015, NII Holdings sold Nextel Mexico to AT&T for $1.88 billion, as a play to “emerge from Chapter 11 reorganization as a stronger, healthier company that is positioned to compete in Brazil’s wireless marketplace.”

As a result of the plan to dissolve, any distributions to NII stockholders are subject to direction from the board of directors and approval by the Delaware court.