Nortel Puts “For Sale” Sign on Calgary Campus

The Calgary campus is valued at 37% of Nortel market cap.

Sell everything and anything they can on the way down and out is not great news

They can burn this $100M in a heartbeat. It is less than 1/10th their annual cash requirements to buy what, another month

Easier to sell Calgary real estate while Calgary booms to high oil prices than MENS while telecom is down
However, oil is crashing too

Derisk, monetize, defer revenues, etc., is the name of the game after exhausting assets, printing billions in Nortel paper, ongoing lay offs /shrinking, etc., in their proverbial struggle to live yet another day as their business declines faster than they can cut or afford to. Cash buys too little time before insolvency now trading at a fraction of when last folding /$4.30 adjusted /43 cents presplit.

Sold Manufacturing to Flex, headquarters to Rogers, UMTS to merged Alcatel-Lucent, and now looking to sell MENs or derisk LTE as they did with WiMax, after so many ongoing layoffs and printing so much Nortel paper.

Now selling Calgary given they need money may already be too late as oil prices tumble. The realtor may be optimistic as they see a commission on the sale but reality may be a far cry from what they expect, with admitted declining prices here.

People walked away from their houses last crash, a 300 grand home on became worth 10 grand and on a ghost street of many throughout the ghost town city. Only reason house prices came back was Calgary boomed when oil prices soared but note resumed decline.

With deflation and economic outlook, oil prices are looking to stay down, and what does Nortel do, tries to dump real estate in the eleventh hour, a few hours too late and for too little to make any significant impact to their increasingly dire outlook .

Oil crashing is temporary. The oil sands still run 24X7.
The only reason oil and interest rates are down right now is because we are in a recession/mini-depression. The arabs don't dare cut back production now while North America and the world is in the state it currently is in. Calgary will soon be the wealthiest place in the world. The oil sands in Canada will surpass Saudi Arabia and North America will not be held hostage by the middle east. The oil sands are booming and saskatchewan has huge deposits much like Calgary. Just watch how obama falls in love with Canada and our natural resources. Wouldn't matter if NT sold that place now or later. Would make no difference.

Canada will sell oil only for peaceful purposes. e.g. manufacturing and donating petrochemical prostheses for disabeld orphan minorities. Their forests must be maintained for many more decades to keep in check the lingering CO2 borne from sundry failed oil wars.

"...built to world-class technical and amenity standards... with massive existing parking."

All fine and dandy, but as a potential buyer I'd be worried that its power grid is strong enough to support my Cisco network (to be installed by outsourced labor).

And: Private parking should be discouraged. Reason: Global warming. Campus access via public transportation only, please.

I would instead place solar panels and wind turbines across the property to finally realize the wind and solar powered network Nortel envisioned decades before its peers.

Check your map of Calgary, there is a LRT (Light Rail Transit) train station at White Horn and one at Castleridge (each approximately 1 block from the Nortel Campus - walking distance) plus bus 40 drops you off at a bus stop on the campus. If you look to the north of the WIC building there is open space for your solar panels and wind turbines. Are you ready to buy?

Bus 40? Route 95 serves the former campus and runs to McKnight-Westwinds LRT. The "1 block" is a 15-minute walk from McKnight-Westwinds. It's a 30-min walk to Whitehorn.

Alas. Building stuff is far more satisfying to me than owning a bunch of it.