SP Telemedia (Soul) to merge with TPG

Stuart Corner
Thursday, 07 February 2008 10:21

IT Industry - Deals

SP Telemedia (ASX: SOT), the telecommunications company that trades as Soul, is to merge with the privately owned TPG group, one of Australia's largest Internet service providers. SP Telemedia will pay $150 million in cash for TPG Holdings Limited, to be funded through debt, plus 270 million SP Telemedia shares. Completion of the acquisition is expected in April 2008. On the basis of SP Telemedia's most recent closing share price of $0.35, the deal will value TPG at $230 million. a FY2008 PE multiple of approximately 8.5x.

The deal will give TPG 37 percent of the merged company and the founder and CEO of TPG, David Teoh, will become the executive chairman of SP Telemedia. The current executive chairman, Rob Millner, will remain on the board.

TPG has more than 200,000 broadband customers and its own network, with 238 DSLAMs, and the companies say the merger will provide significant opportunities for capital and operational cost savings.

TPG was established in 1986 and offers dial up, ADSL and ADSL2+ services to consumers and small business and a variety of network solutions to corporate customers. It has 238 DSLAMs compared to about 30 of SP Telemedia and says and will continue to roll out DSLAM infrastructure. TPG also owns 70 percent of ASX-listed ISP, Chariot. If the deal goes ahead, it will seek to take 100 percent ownership and delist the company by offering the other shareholders a price to be determined by an independent advisor. Chariot, has about 85,000 Internet customers, about one third on ADSL at the end of 2007.

For over two years now, Soul has been touting itself as a significant player in Australia on the strength of a number of key parameters and  has been claiming to be on the acquisition trail for more customers to enable it to better exploit its infrastructure. It has the largest independent fully converged voice, video and data network in Australia; the largest voice enabled IP network in Australia; a 100 percent interest in mobile telephony reseller  B Digital Limited.