Liberty may return Vodafone cash to shareholders
September 17, 2018
Liberty Global CEO Mike Fries has told a Goldman Sachs event in the US that the company is likely to return much of the $12 billion it gained from sales of assets to Vodafone to shareholders through buybacks.
He said more M&A was also possible but there were no particular targets just now.
Fries claimed Liberty had made “six times its money” from Germany and had done well from the UK and from Switzerland. “We are pretty good allocators of capital”, he said. “We don’t do deals just to do deals. We are in this to create value, period.”
Fries said that after the Vodafone deal, the UK Virgin Media business, would account for 60 per cent of operating cash flow and that “looks most like a US cable asset”.
Liberty was focusing on single integrated platforms across its footprint, he said, focusing on its EOS and Connect boxes and a single delivery platform.