Light Reading Mobile – Telecom News, Analysis, Events, and Research
LR Cable News Analysis  

Liberty Global Scoops Up KBW for $4.5B

March 21, 2011 | Jeff Baumgartner |

John Malone doesn't like to lose.

On Monday, his Liberty Global Inc. agreed to buy Kabel BW GmbH & Co., Germany's third-largest MSO, for €3.16 billion ($4.48 billion), outbidding CVC Capital Partners and Hellman & Friedman LLC. The deal, expected to close in the second half of the year, would make Germany the largest European market for Denver-based Liberty Global. (See Liberty Global to Acquire KBW.)

Last year, Liberty Global made its first big play in Germany, closing a US$5.2 billion deal for Unitymedia GmbH, Germany's second-largest MSO, with about 4.6 million subscribers. (See Liberty Splashes $5.2B on German Operator.)

KBW has 2.4 million customers, and its network passes 3.7 million homes.

Why this matters
The purchase of KBW from European private equity firm EQT Partners would make Liberty Global and MSO Kabel Deutschland GmbH close cable rivals in terms of sheer size, creating a two-headed cable monster for Deutsche Telekom AG to contend with. After the KBW deal, Liberty Global would own MSOs serving about 6.9 million subs, still a couple million off of Kabel Deutschland's 9 million-plus.

The buy would expand Malone's already prodigious European cable empire, which, in addition to Unitymedia, includes UPC Broadband, which operates systems in parts of Austria, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Ireland, the Netherlands, Poland, Romania, Slovakia and Switzerland, as well as Telenet in Belgium.

For more
For more about Liberty Global's European handiwork, please check out:

— Jeff Baumgartner, Site Editor, Light Reading Cable


Currently we allow the following HTML tags in comments:

Single tags

These tags can be used alone and don't need an ending tag.

<br> Defines a single line break

<hr> Defines a horizontal line

Matching tags

These require an ending tag - e.g. <i>italic text</i>

<a> Defines an anchor

<b> Defines bold text

<big> Defines big text

<blockquote> Defines a long quotation

<caption> Defines a table caption

<cite> Defines a citation

<code> Defines computer code text

<em> Defines emphasized text

<fieldset> Defines a border around elements in a form

<h1> This is heading 1

<h2> This is heading 2

<h3> This is heading 3

<h4> This is heading 4

<h5> This is heading 5

<h6> This is heading 6

<i> Defines italic text

<p> Defines a paragraph

<pre> Defines preformatted text

<q> Defines a short quotation

<samp> Defines sample computer code text

<small> Defines small text

<span> Defines a section in a document

<s> Defines strikethrough text

<strike> Defines strikethrough text

<strong> Defines strong text

<sub> Defines subscripted text

<sup> Defines superscripted text

<u> Defines underlined text

Network Computing encourages readers to engage in spirited, healthy debate, including taking us to task. However, Network Computing moderates all comments posted to our site, and reserves the right to modify or remove any content that it determines to be derogatory, offensive, inflammatory, vulgar, irrelevant/off-topic, racist or obvious marketing/SPAM. Network Computing further reserves the right to disable the profile of any commenter participating in said activities.

 
Disqus Tips To upload an avatar photo, first complete your Disqus profile. | View the list of supported HTML tags you can use to style comments. | Please read our commenting policy.
 
Related Content
Most Popular
Read
White Papers SPONSORED CONTENT
Featured
Resource Library SPONSORED CONTENT
Spanning Tree
An Ethernet protocol that checks a network for loops