Liberty Global in counter-bid for Kabel Deutschland

Kabel Deutschland (KDG) has confirmed that it has received a counter-offer from Liberty Global following Vodafone’s bid to acquire the cable operator.

KDG said it had received a “preliminary proposal” from Liberty Global, with no certainty at this stage that a transaction would result or what the term would be.

According to the UK Financial Times, Liberty Global is offering approximately €7.5 billion for KDG, topping the bid made by Vodafone.

Liberty Global has said that KDG’s statement that it had received a proposal is accurate, but has not commented further.

Liberty Global’s bid could fall foul of the German Federal Cartel Office, which has in the past been highly unfavourable to too much concentration in the cable sector. Liberty Global already controls the country’s second and third largest cable providers, Unitymedia and Kabel BW.

Speaking at the recent ANGA COM event in Cologne, Liberty Global president and CEO Mike Fries said his company “had plenty of money left for Germany” following its acquisition of UK cable operator Virgin Media. Fries said that Germany was Liberty Global’s fastest growing market and that the company wanted to be “bigger in Germany, one day”.

Fries said he didn’t wish to enter into discussion about the logic of regulatory resistance to cable consolidation, but added consolidation made industrial logic.