LONDON — The European telecommunications company Altice agreed on Wednesday to acquire a majority stake in Suddenlink Communications, a privately held American cable operator, in a deal that valued the company at $ 9.1 billion.
It is the first time that Altice has entered the United States, after having aggressively expanded across Europe and the Caribbean. Through its Numericable-SFR division, Altice is one of the largest telecom operators in France, with about 6.5 million fixed-line customers and 22.5 million mobile customers.
Altice said it would acquire a 70 percent stake in Suddenlink — with about 1.5 million customers in 17 states, including North Carolina, Texas and West Virginia — from the private equity firm BC Partners and Canada Pension Plan Investment Board.
BC Partners, Canada Pension Plan Investment Board and other investors will retain a minority stake in the St. Louis-based Suddenlink, according to a news release.
"Our investment in Suddenlink, our first in the cable sector in the U.S., opens an attractive industrial and strategic avenue for Altice in the U.S., one of the largest and fastest growing communications markets in the world," Altice's chief executive, Dexter Goei, said in a statement.
The deal is part of a new wave of consolidation that is likely to continue sweeping across the United States cable industry after the collapse of Comcast's $ 45 billion takeover of Time Warner Cable because of regulatory concerns.
On Monday, Charter Communications, for example, announced that it would pursue its $ 10.4 billion deal for Bright House Networks. That deal is considered a potential precursor to Charter's push to acquire Time Warner Cable.
The multibillion-dollar deal for Suddenlink also represents the latest chapter of Altice's meteoric growth, which has seen the Amsterdam-listed telecom company scoop up assets from France to the Dominican Republic. Over the last decade, the French entrepreneur Patrick Drahi has built Altice into a global operation that now competes with some of Europe's most-established telecom operators.
Shares in Altice, which has a market value of $ 34.6 billion, rose 7.2 percent in Amsterdam on Wednesday morning.
After raising about 1.3 billion euros, or about $ 1.5 billion, in its initial public offering in 2014, Altice acquired a number of European assets as the region's telecom industry went through its own round of consolidation.
That included the €17 billion takeover of SFR, the mobile wireless company previously owned by Vivendi. Altice combined the unit with its own cable business, Numericable, and has used the enlarged entity to challenge Orange, the former French telecom monopoly.
Analysts have suggested that this may not be last deal that Altice tries to secure in the United States, though some question whether the European telecom operator will be able to compete with the deeper pockets of its larger American rivals.
BC Partners and the Canadian pension fund bought Suddenlink, which has 6,000 employees and annual revenue of $ 2.33 billion, for $ 2 billion, plus debt, in 2012.
The St Louis-based operator remains in a standoff with the media conglomerate Viacom, whose channels include MTV, Comedy Central and Nickelodeon, after the two could not agree to the rates that Suddenlink would pay to broadcast Viacom's television networks.
Yet in a sign of how quickly the industry is changing, Suddenlink now has more high-speed Internet customers than basic video customers, reducing the company's reliance on media companies like Viacom to attract subscribers to its services.
JPMorgan Chase, PJT Partners, BNP Paribas and the law firms Franklin, Covington, Mayer Brown and Ropes & Gray advised Alice on the Suddenlink deal.
Latham & Watkins acted as legal advisers to BC Partners and Canada Pension Plan Investment Board, and LionTree Advisors advised Suddenlink.
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