By Zijing Wu and Anne-Sylvaine Chassany - Sep 20, 2011 6:09 PM GMT+0700
Warburg Pincus LLC and Cinven Ltd., co-owners of Ziggo BV, may delay the cable-television company’s initial public offering to next year as global markets slump, said two people with knowledge of the matter.
No decision has been made, said the people, who declined to be identified as the process is private. The buyout firms had planned to sell 25 percent to 50 percent of the Dutch company in an IPO this year for as much as 1.5 billion euros ($2.1 billion), people with knowledge of the matter said in April.
European companies, including Siemens AG (SIE)’s Munich-based Osram lighting unit, shelved IPOs this year at almost twice the rate as the same period in 2010 as the sovereign debt crisis diminished the appeal of new stocks. Almost two-thirds of the companies that went public in western Europe this year are trading below their IPO prices, and the Stoxx Europe 600 Index has dropped 17 percent this year.
A decision hasn’t been made about a possible IPO, said Martijn Jonker, a spokesman for Ziggo. He declined to comment further.
Cinven, based in London, and Warburg each invested in predecessors of Ziggo more than five years ago. The Utrecht- based company had more than 3 million TV customers at the end of June, a 2.3 percent decline from a year earlier, according to a statement in July. The company, led by Chief Executive Officer Bernard Dijkhuizen, was formed in February 2007 from the merger of three cable operators.
Revenue climbed 7.6 percent in the second quarter to 363.7 million euros, as more customers opted for packages of multiple services, such as Internet, phone and TV. Ziggo has about 1.6 million high-speed Internet subscribers.
To contact the reporters on this story: Zijing Wu in London at zwu17@bloomberg.net; Anne-Sylvaine Chassany in Paris at achassany@bloomberg.net
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Jacqueline Simmons at jackiem@bloomberg.net
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