Lib­er­ty Glob­al, the world's largest in­ter­na­tion­al TV and broad­band com­pa­ny, has com­plet­ed its ac­qui­si­tion of Ca­ble and Wire­less Com­mu­ni­ca­tions (CWC) in a trans­ac­tion val­ued at ap­prox­i­mate­ly US$7.4 bil­lion on an en­ter­prise val­ue ba­sis.

En­ter­prise val­ue in­cludes the net debt of CWC, the mar­ket val­ue as­cribed to all class­es of Lib­er­ty shares and a div­i­dend paid to CWC.

"This is a very ex­cit­ing day for Lib­er­ty Glob­al. We couldn't be more thrilled to be com­plet­ing this ac­qui­si­tion which is re­al­ly a com­bi­na­tion of two great com­pa­nies," pres­i­dent and CEO of Lib­er­ty Glob­al Mike Fries said yes­ter­day in a con­fer­ence call to me­dia across the Caribbean and Latin Amer­i­can.

"Ca­ble and Wire­less for us was just the per­fect fit. The com­pa­ny has a long and sto­ried his­to­ry. We felt that this was the right time for us to de­vel­op scale in our in­dus­try giv­en the com­pet­i­tive en­vi­ron­ment that we op­er­ate in and Ca­ble and Wire­less of­fers that."

Com­ment­ing on telecom­mu­ni­ca­tion pen­e­tra­tion across the re­gion, Fries said great po­ten­tial ex­ists for Lib­er­ty Glob­al to add val­ue and in­crease its foot­print.

He said: "If we look at mo­bile da­ta pen­e­tra­tion, or broad­band da­ta pen­e­tra­tion, or pay TV pen­e­tra­tion, or smart­phone pen­e­tra­tion in Latin Amer­i­ca and the Caribbean and we com­pare it to the US and Eu­rope, it's clear that there's a great op­por­tu­ni­ty to bring in­vest­ments and in­no­va­tion to this re­gion of the world and we're ex­cit­ed to do that."

He said rough­ly 20 to 25 per cent of Lib­er­ty's rev­enue is in­vest­ed in the net­works and tech­nol­o­gy part of the busi­ness and he sees the same ap­ply­ing across the re­gion with most of the in­vest­ments tar­get­ted to­wards up­grad­ing the qual­i­ty of net­works.

Fries as­sured that there will be no ma­jor shake-ups or cor­po­rate changes in the near to medi­um term as a re­sult of the ac­qui­si­tion.

In­ter­im CEO of CWC, John Reid, who was al­so on the call, ex­pressed con­fi­dence that CWC's fail­ure to sell its 49 per cent stake in TSTT would not af­fect the ap­proval of the Lib­er­ty ac­qui­si­tion.

On March 12th 2015, the Telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions Au­thor­i­ty of Trinidad and To­ba­go (TATT) made the sale of the CWC stake in TSTT a con­di­tion of the reg­u­la­to­ry ap­proval of the Colom­bus Com­mu­ni­ca­tions merg­er with CWC.

Reid said: "It needs to be un­der­stood that there has not been a lack of ef­fort to di­vest of that par­tic­u­lar as­set. We've en­gaged all the rel­e­vant gov­ern­ment par­ties and ex­tend­ed agen­cies and its an on­go­ing process that some­times takes time."

Reid said changes in the po­lit­i­cal ad­min­is­tra­tion had been a fac­tor that hin­dered the sale of CWC's stake in TSTT.

"We've had gov­ern­ment boards changed, we've had reg­u­la­to­ry agency boards changed and so that con­tributes to it tak­ing longer than first an­tic­i­pat­ed but our ex­pec­ta­tion is that, based on our con­tin­ued ef­forts to di­a­logue with the var­i­ous par­ties, this will not in­ter­rupt this process and that we will be giv­en the green­light to pur­sue this sale to Lib­er­ty Glob­al."