Poland’s incumbent telco is about to sell off its broadcasting arm, according to Polish political newspaper Rzeczpospolita. The sale will have been triggered by France Telecom which owns a majority of the shares in Telekomunikacja Polska and has been on the cards for about a month. The papers says that the deal could be done by the end of February and may raise as much as $500 million. The paper said that all of the bids are more than 10 times EBITDA which is where the suggested price comes from.
So far about six companies have come forward to take the broadcasting assets off its hands, and the move seems odd for a company, which in its home country in France has only recently entered the market for digital broadcasting, taken on a number of DVB-T channels and buying into soccer rights.
Telekomunikacja Polska or Polish Telecom as we might call it, is also known as TP and the division for sale is TP Emitel. It’s public on the local Polish exchange, and is a conventional telco offering fixed lines and broadband, satellite services and a cellular system through PTK Centertel. In the Pay TV area is has around an equal number of satellite and IPTV customers, totaling 500,000 between them, growing collectively at 75% last year, with the satellite on the cusp over overtaking IPTV and growing itself at 130% last year.
But the part that is for sale owns the broadcasting infrastructure which includes 300 broadcast sites with around 50 antennas which are over 200 meters tall, and this network covers all of Poland. It is thought that France Telecom doesn’t want to stay in ownership as the system goes through digitization during 2013.
Private equity groups are said to be queuing for the assets, but this would fit the profile of France’s TPF, one of the biggest broadcast operators in Europe with broadcast networks in France, Germany and Finland, so we suspect that not all of the bidders are private equity groups or that if they are, they are not the final resting place of this asset.