Liberty Global to Acquire Virgin Media

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By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated Published
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Liberty Global Inc. (NASDAQ: LBTYA), controlled by American billionaire John Malone, made a successful offer to buy huge U.K. cable firm Virgin Media Inc. (NASDAQ: VMED). The media has pegged the price as high as $23 billion. With debt backed out, the number is closer to $16 billion.

The press has made out that the Malone move is a challenge to Rupert Murdoch, who also has TV interests through his large ownership in BSkyB.

The Wall Street Journal reports:

Virgin Media, the U.K.’s No. 2 pay-TV operator with close to five million customers, said earlier Tuesday that it was in talks with Liberty Global “concerning a possible transaction,” without detailing what form any deal would take.

Liberty and Virgin said they expect about $180 million in annual cost savings once the companies are fully integrated. “We think we’ve been conservative with that number,” Liberty Chief Executive Mike Fries said in an interview. “The synergies are traditionally coming from areas like network and IT and procurement. What we do every day is buy technology from the same vendors and negotiate contracts from the same programmers.”

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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.

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