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Illustration: Paul Daviz |
It was a pretty straightforward question with a pretty revealing answer. When Patrick Drahi, Franco-Israeli billionaire and founder of French telecommunications group Altice, was recently asked which other US cable operator he might be interested in buying following the announcement of his firm’s $17.7 billion purchase of Cablevision in September, he reportedly stated: “All of them, basically.”
Given Altice’s recent track record, that response is not as outrageous as it sounds. Since buying most of Société Francaise du Radiotéléphone from Vivendi last April, Altice has snapped up Portugal Telecom, more of SFR, US cable firms Suddenlink and Cablevision and has tried, but failed, to buy Bouygues Telecom and Time Warner Cable.
And as long as the markets will fund him, Drahi shows no sign of slowing down or of becoming a poorer source of fee income for the banks that arrange his funding. In the nine months to September 2015 Altice incurred deal fees of €69 million ($75.5 million).
“When you are focused on debt reduction, it is because you have a growth problem,” Drahi declared in May 2015 when speaking to a French parliamentary committee.
