Spanish telecoms group Telefonica has expressed an interest in buying AT&T Inc’s pay-TV assets in Latin America, Reuters reports, citing a provisional value of USD10 billion. AT&T, which inherited satellite TV businesses in around a dozen markets across Latin America and the Caribbean via its USD48.5 billion takeover of US-based pay-TV giant DirecTV, has yet to decide if it will explore a deal with Telefonica, or another company, people familiar with the matter told the news agency.
As previously reported by TeleGeography’s CommsUpdate, in December 2015 AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson discussed the US telco’s future plans at the UBS Global Media and Communications Conference in New York, telling a conference audience: ‘Would we consider selling them? Yes, but we are in no rush … They are healthy businesses … If someone wanted to talk about a strategic combination of those assets with a different product, we’d have to look at it’.