TDC eyes Sweden’s Com Hem

Swedish cablenet Com Hem has become the latest cable operator to attract a suitor from the telecoms sector. 

It has emerged that the company, currently in the hands of private equity firm BC Partners, has been in talks with Danish telco TDC since last June – before Com Hem went public.

When news of the potential tie up emerged over the weekend shares in Com Hem rose by an initial 9%.

TDC already owns the Norwegian cable operator GET, purchased in September from GS Capital Partners and Quadrangle Capital Partners for NOK 13.8bn (€1.79bn), as well as its own YouSee cable operation in Denmark.

The Swedish cablenet now has 22% of its installed base connected to the TiVo set-top platform. Its seen an increase of 30,000 over the third quarter to reach 132,000 customers. The subscriber base as a whole has grown by 15,000 to 861,000.

Com Hem subscribers down 2,700 in 3Q 2013

Com Hem has reported results for the third quarter of 2013. During the quarter the number of digital television subscriptions decreased by 2,700 (-0.4 percent) to 603,000 subscriptions, a decrease of 9,700 since the end of the third quarter of 2012.

Number of subscribers:

              Q3 2013  Q2 2013  Q1 2013  Q4 2012  Q3 2012
              -------  -------  -------  -------  -------
Digital TV    603,000  605,700  613,300  611,700  612,700

On September 30, 2013, Com Hem’s next generation Set-Top-Box powered by TiVo was made available to purchase via Com Hem´s sales channels. In conjunction Com Hem also announced four new digital-television packages, replacing the old digital-television packages.

On October 7, 2013, TiVo was commercially launched, together with the cloud based service TiVoToGo. On October 7, 2013, Com Hem also announced that the Netflix-app will be available for digital-television subscribers with a TiVo Inc. Set-Top-Box, as of December 2013.