Liberty Global and M7 Group reach an agreement for 3 telecom companies

Liberty Global and M7 Group reach an agreement for 3 telecom companies

Liberty Global reached and agreement with M7 Group to sell the satellite TV operations (DTH) from 4 countries (Romania, Czech Republic, Slovakia and Hungary), the sold companies are Focus Sat (Romania), UPC Direct (Hungary) and FreeSat (Czech Republic and Slovakia).

Liberty Global will sell its satellite tv operations from the 3 countries for around €180 million and the transaction closure is expected to be made in the first half of 2019 due to approvals needed from the European Comission.

M7 Group is a media company which controlls several telecom operators from Austria (AustriaSat), TeleSat Numerique and TV Vlaanderen (Belgium), SkyLink (Czech Republic and Slovakia), KabelKiosk (Germany), CanalDigitaal, Stipte, Fibernederland and Online.nl (Holland).

Satellite TV (DTH) provider Focus Sat was founded in 2004 being the first DTH company in Romania, in 2005 50% of their corporate actions were acquired by Liberty Global followed by a complete take-over in 2006.

The European Comission may trigger an investigation in case they consider the transaction may unbalance the competition in these countries, this kind of investigation was started in Germany and Czech Republic regarding the transaction between Liberty Global and Vodafone. Also, they can approve this transaction with additional conditions.

We would like to remind that Liberty Global reached an agreement with Vodafone to sell the cable tv operations from Germany, Hungary, Romania and Czech Republic for around €18 billion, for this transaction they still wait for the approval from the European Comission. In Romania, this means UPC will be owned by Vodafone (Vodafone only provides mobile services in this moment), Vodafone board already announced they have an integration team ready for next year.

In addition, there are rumours regarding another important potential transaction for the Romanian telecom market about Akta Telecom being bought by an important telecom service provider from Romania. We will provide more details as soon as the transaction is sealed.

We will see what will happen after Focus Sat is sold to M7 group, how this transaction will affect Focus Sat subscribers and which will be the major changes.

What is your opinion regarding Focus Sat, UPC Direct and FreeSat being sold to M7 group?

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