AT&T today announced plans to spin out its various video businesses — DirecTV, AT&T TV, and U-Verse — into a new company that it will jointly control with TPG Capital. The deal sees AT&T holding on to a 70 percent stake in the company, with TPG getting the other 30. “The transaction to separate AT&T’s US video business into New DirecTV implies an enterprise value for the new company of $16.25 billion.”
AT&T paid a total of $67 billion to buy DirecTV: it landed the satellite provider for $48.5 billion in 2014, and the rest was debt that AT&T took on. With this “premium new video entity” valued at less than a quarter of that, you can see how just how badly the original mega-acquisition has fared. “We certainly didn’t expect this outcome…
