Client Profile: Wireless Assets

UCFBI – Winter Springs

Innovative Platform Transforms the Management of Telecom Investments

Wireless Assets is a financial industry research and analysis company providing highly intuitive visualization dashboards for Wall Street investment banking clients looking to better understand how the massive technology shifts — particularly in the wireless space — will impact the companies in which they invest. The company’s unique platform articulates core industry metrics alongside cutting-edge analysis in a way that provides a distinctly powerful vantage point for their customers.

Bill Stueber, a 30+ year wireless industry veteran and senior partner at Telecom Partners Group, founded Wireless Assets as a client of the UCF Business Incubator – Winter Springs in 2014. His experience as a former CEO of public and private telecom companies, in addition to more than a decade as a Wall Street analyst, gives him a rare blend of operator/financial industry tenure. Stueber’s timely, clear insights into complex issues stem from decades of deep expertise crossing the entire telecom ecosystem. This 360° perspective has become one of the company’s greatest commodities.

The platform is a customizable dashboard that offers an innovative visualization experience that the company expects will revolutionize the way Wall Street interacts with research and analysis. Features include natural language data discovery, self-service custom visualizations, dynamic analytic models, geo-mapping and access to underlying granular data. Over the past five years, the founders of Wireless Assets have performed more than 600 analysis projects for an array of Wall Street clients that represent more than 50 percent of the world’s top 100 investment banks.

“Traditional analysis methods get it wrong most of the time when it comes to valuing telecom assets,” explains Stueber. “The sheer impact and speed of today’s technology migrations require an extremely in-depth understanding of inner mechanics at the core industry ecosystem level to fully predict scope and impact. Today the wireless segment alone represents over four percent of global GDP [gross domestic product]. That’s larger than the transportation, hospitality, agriculture or auto industries.”

According to Stueber, important components of any valuation analysis — such as spectrum, towers and infrastructure platforms — can only be accurately assessed in the context of the value they provide going forward.

“We have seen disastrous predictive results from mainstream methods in cases like BlackBerry, Motorola, Alcatel-Lucent and Nokia,” says Stueber. “Similarly, many upside movements were missed, like DISH, TV Broadcaster spectrum assets, Clearwire and Leap, from inaccurate underlying spectrum portfolio valuation assessment. Hundred of billions were lost.”

Stueber says that typically only after a massive loss in stock or debt value, an event, bankruptcy or a regulatory decision does the real value of a company typically surface. In the meantime, billions are lost on unnecessary investment risk. Wireless Assets offers a more viable solution to establish insight into key metrics and valuation scenarios.

“Our unique blend of industry expertise and financial market analytics experience allows us to rapidly identify and articulate emerging trends in asset value, ecosystem landscape changes and impact of technology,” says Stueber. “We provide this well ahead of typical industry research metric platforms.”

Wireless Assets considers their involvement with the UCF Business Incubation Program (UCFBIP) to be an important driving factor of their success. “With seven distinct incubator locations across a myriad of very focused areas of technology expertise, we very quickly understood the depth of commitment Orlando and UCF have made helping tech firms grow and prosper in a geographically enviable, cost-efficient, low employee churn environment. It has truly been a pleasure working with the entire UCFBIP team,” Stueber says.

Stueber and his team have ambitious plans for growth as they build out the capabilities of their analytics platform. “We are focused on providing a single-source telecom industry metrics platform that melds an extraordinarily large-scope data and perspective into an intuitive, manageable set of metric visualizations. Our goal is to help our clients mitigate investment risk while extending opportunities for profit from understanding areas where tremendous value is being created.”

For more information, visit WirelessAssets.com.