Now that US-owned ca­ble op­er­a­tor Lib­er­ty Glob­al has of­fi­cial­ly tak­en con­trol, Ca­ble & Wire­less Com­mu­ni­ca­tions (CWC) is part of Lib­er­ty Glob­als Latin Amer­i­can and Caribbean (LiLAC) group tripling the size of that en­ti­ty from US$1.2 bil­lion rev­enue to US$3.6 bil­lion.

The merged op­er­a­tion has sub­stan­tial busi­ness to busi­ness and sub­ma­rine fi­bre op­er­a­tions and will serve ten mil­lion video, voice, broad­band and mo­bile sub­scribers in more than 20 coun­tries. The size of the com­bined work­force is 7,200.

John Reid, the new in­ter­im CEO of CWC and for­mer pres­i­dent of Colum­bus Com­mu­ni­ca­tions, is in charge of the in­te­gra­tion of the two telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions en­ti­ties.

He takes over from Phil Bent­ley, the out­go­ing CEO of CWC.

In a con­fer­ence call with jour­nal­ists across the re­gion on Mon­day, Lib­er­ty Glob­al CEO Mike Fries said: "I would like to per­son­al­ly con­grat­u­late Phil Bent­ley, out­go­ing CEO of CWC, for his great work over the last two and a half years. I would al­so like to wel­come John Reid as in­ter­im CEO of CWC.

"We look for­ward to work­ing close­ly with John over the next six months as we eval­u­ate how best to struc­ture and in­te­grate CWC in­to the LiLAC Group and joint­ly ex­plore new op­por­tu­ni­ties for growth and ex­pan­sion.

"John was pre­vi­ous­ly pres­i­dent of CWCs Con­sumer Group and al­so held oth­er high-pro­file man­age­ment roles at Colum­bus Com­mu­ni­ca­tions and Per­sona Com­mu­ni­ca­tions."

Fries said by lever­ag­ing Lib­er­ty Glob­als scale and man­age­ment ex­per­tise, the firms will "ac­cel­er­ate in­no­va­tion, en­hance the speed and qual­i­ty of our net­works and ex­pand op­por­tu­ni­ties for all stake­hold­ers."

The val­ue of the deal was giv­en as US$7.4 bil­lion on an en­ter­prise val­ue ba­sis, down from the pre­vi­ous­ly re­port­ed US$8.2 bil­lion.

In No­vem­ber, when the deal was an­nounced, Lib­er­ty of­fi­cials spoke about the long-term eq­ui­ty val­ue of the new en­ti­ty on the ba­sis of or­gan­ic growth and "fur­ther con­sol­i­da­tion op­por­tu­ni­ties through­out Latin Amer­i­ca and the Caribbean."

Ear­li­er in the year, Lib­er­ty Glob­als largest share­hold­er John Mal­one ac­quired a 13 per cent stake in CWC fol­low­ing the UK groups ac­qui­si­tion of Colum­bus In­ter­na­tion­al.