Completel (France) - Jan 2008

unquote
01 January 2008

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In August 2007 Cinven and Altice announced they would acquire 55% of listed French carrier Completel, through the joint venture vehicle Altice B2B France. The deal was valued at approximately EUR 720m. By December 2007 Carlyle joined the consortium, taking a 35% stake in the vehicle, with Cinven holding a 35% stake and Altice the remainder. In January 2008, the buyout vehicle Altice B2B France held over 99% of Completel and commenced a statutory buy-out procedure to obtain the remaining shares at EUR 35.50 per share.

Deal write up - Feb 08 The Carlyle Group has acquired a 35% stake in cable operators Numericable and Completel from Cinven and Altice for more than €1bn. Both the Carlyle Group and Cinven now retain a 35% stake. Altice One, the French cable operator and Cinven portfolio company, has a 30% stake. The deal values Numericable and Completel at €2.86bn. Cinven ceded 35% of its stake in Numericable to Carlyle; Altice ceded 21% of Completel, while Cinven sold 14% to Carlyle. Cinven did not disclose the return on the partial exit, however, after good performance by Numericable it is said that Cinven has already recouped its original investment thanks to a refinancing round that took place in the first quarter of 2007. Cinven and Altice acquired Completel in August 2007 in a deal which valued the business c€723m.

Company

Numericable operates a high speed network in France, providing high definition television, video-ondemand, telephony services and broadband services for about 10 million households. Numericable was formed in 1995 when Cinven acquired the cable operating subsidiaries of France Telecom and Vivendi Universal for €528m. The deal constituted about 99% of the cable operators in France. Numericable is the first operator to have deployed its fibre network in France on a large scale. Completel is a corporate telecommunications service provider using an alternative metropolitan fibre access network and digital subscriber line network. Formed in 1998 Completel is the third-largest DSL network in France’s rapidly evolving telecommunications sector. In 2007, Numericable had a turnover of €950m while Completel had a turnover of €290m.

People

Benoît Colas and Steve Rosengarten worked on the deal for Carlyle. Patrick Drahi, founder and CEO of Altice was involved with the deal. Phillipe Besnier is CEO of Numericable.

Advisers

Equity - Goldman Sachs, Eric Hamou (Corporate Finance)Equity - KPMG, Mathieu Wallich-Petit (Financial Due Diligence)Equity - Linklaters, Betrand Cardi, Fabrice de la Morandiere (Legal)Equity - RBC Daniels, Mark Mullen (Financial Due Diligence)

Sourced from: France unquote" 88 (Feb 2008)