Carlyle Group will pay about US$1.3 billion for the majority stake in Eastern Multimedia Group (東森集團), one of the nation's largest cable-television operators, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported, without saying where it got the information.
Carlyle outbid a mix of financial and industry bidders, including a group that included private-equity rival Newbridge Capital LLC and Liberty Media Corp, the WSJ said on its Web site, without citing anyone.
"Nothing is mature enough to make an announcement now,'' Eastern Multimedia spokesman Johnny Sand said when contacted by telephone yesterday.
He declined to elaborate.
Carlyle's Hong Kong-based spokeswoman Dorothy Lee also declined to comment.
Eastern Multimedia controls almost a quarter of the nation's cable television market. The operator would be the second to be sold in Taiwan in the past four months, as overseas firms bet they can boost profits by introducing new technology and services.
Carlyle is seeking to borrow NT$30 billion (US$927 million) for its bid, three bankers competing to lend the money to the Washington-based buyout fund said last month. The bankers declining to be identified before an official announcement. San Francisco-based Newbridge is teaming up with US content provider Liberty Media Corp on its competing offer, two other people involved in the sale said last month.
Final bidders for the group's Eastern Multimedia Co (
Carlyle wants to buy at least two-thirds of Eastern Multimedia in the first stage of investment, said the bankers. The private equity firm is asking banks to bid to finance the purchase of a 100 percent stake, they said.
The sale comes after Macquarie Media Group, Australia's biggest commercial radio operator, agreed last December to buy Taiwan Broadband Communications (台灣寬頻通訊) from Carlyle for A$1.19 billion (US$890 million), giving it a 12 percent market share.
The US buyout firm bought Taiwan Broadband in 1999 for about US$200 million.
Cable television attracted 4.5 million subscribers in the year to Dec. 31 since being introduced in 1998, according to the Government Information Office (GIO). About 200,000 customers subscribed last year, it said.
Eastern Multimedia had 1.05 million subscribers, or a 23.4 percent market share, as of Dec. 31, followed by China Network Systems Co (中嘉網路) with 21.8 percent and Taiwan Broadband with 13.6 percent, said Huang Ching-yi (黃金益), a GIO official.
Taiwan has set a ceiling of 60 percent for combined direct and indirect holdings by foreign funds in a cable TV operator, Huang said.
Sydney-based Macquarie Media avoided the ceiling in its acquisition by arranging for a local investor to hold preferred stock in Taiwan Broadband.
Eastern Multimedia said March 6 that it was in talks with international and local companies for a possible stake sale. It also owns units that operate news, entertainment and shopping channels.
Carlyle, manager of the largest US buyout fund, has more than US$34.9 billion under management, according to its Web site last month.
GROWING OWINGS: While Luxembourg and China swapped the top three spots, the US continued to be the largest exposure for Taiwan for the 41st consecutive quarter The US remained the largest debtor nation to Taiwan’s banking sector for the 41st consecutive quarter at the end of September, after local banks’ exposure to the US market rose more than 2 percent from three months earlier, the central bank said. Exposure to the US increased to US$198.896 billion, up US$4.026 billion, or 2.07 percent, from US$194.87 billion in the previous quarter, data released by the central bank showed on Friday. Of the increase, about US$1.4 billion came from banks’ investments in securitized products and interbank loans in the US, while another US$2.6 billion stemmed from trust assets, including mutual funds,
Micron Memory Taiwan Co (台灣美光), a subsidiary of US memorychip maker Micron Technology Inc, has been granted a NT$4.7 billion (US$149.5 million) subsidy under the Ministry of Economic Affairs A+ Corporate Innovation and R&D Enhancement program, the ministry said yesterday. The US memorychip maker’s program aims to back the development of high-performance and high-bandwidth memory chips with a total budget of NT$11.75 billion, the ministry said. Aside from the government funding, Micron is to inject the remaining investment of NT$7.06 billion as the company applied to participate the government’s Global Innovation Partnership Program to deepen technology cooperation, a ministry official told the
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), the world’s leading advanced chipmaker, officially began volume production of its 2-nanometer chips in the fourth quarter of this year, according to a recent update on the company’s Web site. The low-key announcement confirms that TSMC, the go-to chipmaker for artificial intelligence (AI) hardware providers Nvidia Corp and iPhone maker Apple Inc, met its original roadmap for the next-generation technology. Production is currently centered at Fab 22 in Kaohsiung, utilizing the company’s first-generation nanosheet transistor technology. The new architecture achieves “full-node strides in performance and power consumption,” TSMC said. The company described the 2nm process as
JOINT EFFORTS: MediaTek would partner with Denso to develop custom chips to support the car-part specialist company’s driver-assist systems in an expanding market MediaTek Inc (聯發科), the world’s largest mobile phone chip designer, yesterday said it is working closely with Japan’s Denso Corp to build a custom automotive system-on-chip (SoC) solution tailored for advanced driver-assistance systems and cockpit systems, adding another customer to its new application-specific IC (ASIC) business. This effort merges Denso’s automotive-grade safety expertise and deep vehicle integration with MediaTek’s technologies cultivated through the development of Media- Tek’s Dimensity AX, leveraging efficient, high-performance SoCs and artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities to offer a scalable, production-ready platform for next-generation driver assistance, the company said in a statement yesterday. “Through this collaboration, we are bringing two