Charter Communications Inc. has agreed to combine with privately held Cox Communications in a deal that would unite two of the biggest US cable providers.
The transaction will value Cox at about $34.5 billion including debt, according to a statement Friday that confirmed an earlier Bloomberg News report. The Cox family will be the largest shareholder in the combined company with a stake of about 23% and will have seats on the board.
Shares of Charter have risen about 22% this year, giving the company a market value of roughly $66 billion.
The combination is one of the largest of the year and come at a time when cable companies are facing increasing competition from wireless providers such as AT&T Inc. and T-Mobile US Inc., which are luring away their broadband customers with their own internet offerings. At the same time, streaming companies such as Netflix Inc. have upended the traditional business of pay-TV.
In November, Liberty Media Chairman John Malone helped fuel M&A expectations involving Charter when he said the company should be allowed to merge with a media or telecom rival to stay competitive. Speaking at Liberty Media’s investor day in New York, he named Cox among a number of possible merger candidates. Charter and Cox previously discussed a potential deal more than a decade ago.
“This combination will augment our ability to innovate and provide high-quality, competitively priced products, delivered with outstanding customer service, to millions of homes and businesses,” Chris Winfrey, President and CEO of Charter, said in Friday’s statement.
Turf War
Cable and phone companies have been engaged in an intense turf war, seeking to win over customers in areas that others have dominated. Cable providers have been selling their own mobile phone plans by leasing network access from major carriers. At the same time, phone carriers have been poaching home internet subscribers from cable companies.
The bet is that customers will in the future prefer to buy their internet and mobile phone services from the same provider — a trend referred to as convergence. A combination of Charter and Cox would position them to better compete in that environment by allowing them to bundle offerings and more efficiently invest in infrastructure.
“Charter is aggressively marketing its converged mobile fixed bundles at competitive rates to improve subscriber acquisition and retention,” according to Bloomberg Intelligence analysts. “Regardless, the entire cable sector is being hurt by intensifying telecom competition from both fiber coverage and fixed wireless access.”
For Cox, which has been viewed as a perennial takeover target, a tie-up with Charter would end more than 70 years of outright ownership by the Cox family. Cox Communications is the main division of Cox Enterprises, a conglomerate founded around the time of the Spanish-American War more than a century ago.
The Cox family entered the cable business in the 1960s and has grown Cox Communications into the largest private broadband company in America, offering internet to almost 7 million customers. The company’s systems and regional footprint are expected to complement those of Charter, increasing the chances of a deal passing muster with regulators. Even so, the deal could be a litmus test for US antitrust scrutiny under President Donald Trump’s new administration.
Operating under the Spectrum brand, Charter is the top cable TV company and the second-biggest broadband provider in the US, according to data from Bloomberg Intelligence. It had more than 12 million video subscribers and about 30 million internet customers as of the end of March, earnings show.
Last year, Charter agreed to buy Liberty Broadband Corp. in an all-stock transaction. That deal consolidated two public companies in which cable billionaire Malone held significant interests. Malone remains chairman of Liberty Broadband.
