Liberty Global to buy Cable & Wireless in $5.3B deal

John Malone's Liberty Global said on Monday that it has agreed to acquire Cable & Wireless Communications (C&W), which offers cable and other services in the Caribbean, in a deal valued at $5.3 billion (3.5 billion pounds).

Mike Fries, the boss of Liberty Global, described the deal as a "watershed moment" for the company, which is expanding in Latin America and the Caribbean.

Cable and Wireless said the Liberty Global offer values the company at about $8.2 billion, including debt.

The purchase would give Mr Malone, who has bought numerous properties in Ireland since the crash, a critical mass in Latin America, where he created a tracking stock in July called LiLAC for Liberty Global's assets in Chile and Puerto Rico.

Business as usual11/17/2015 It was released yesterday that The Board of Cable & Wireless Communications Plc (CWC) has reached an agreement on the terms of a recommended acquisition for the entire issued and to be issued share capital of CWC by Liberty Global.

At the time, that deal was valued at around nine or ten times ebitda - earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation - and was deemed by analysts to be a hefty price. As part of that deal, Malone and the two co-founders of Columbus were given a 36 percent stake of the combined company.

Earlier this year, Cable and Wireless announced that it had completed a US$1.85 billion acquisition of 100 per cent of the equity of Columbus global Inc.

But The NY Times reports that "as European regulators increasingly frowned on further consolidation in the region's telecom sector, Liberty Global shifted a few of its focus to Latin America and the Caribbean".

"Upon completion, the combined business will serve 10 million video, data, voice and mobile subscribers, with leading positions across multiple markets", Fries added. Its United Kingdom network and worldwide submarine cables were sold to Vodafone, while mobile and fixed line operations dotted around the world became CWC.

"We have seen Malone build out infrastructure first in Europe to create a distribution platform and now he's adding content deals". While Malone has said Vodafone's assets in Europe would be attractive, he said the two companies have different corporate cultures that would make a combination hard. Cable & Wireless rose 0.4% in London to 73.75 pence.