An unnamed 37.4% shareholder of Russian DTH operator Tricolor TV is reportedly seeking regulatory approval to acquire an additional 50% stake.
If successful, the shareholder will hold an 87.4% stake in the operator, according to reports citing the…
An unnamed 37.4% shareholder of Russian DTH operator Tricolor TV is reportedly seeking regulatory approval to acquire an additional 50% stake.
If successful, the shareholder will hold an 87.4% stake in the operator, according to reports citing the Federal Antimonopoly Service (FAS), Russia’s competition regulator.
Tricolour and FAS were unable to comment before the press deadline.
However, the development comes shortly after local reports suggested the company had quietly changed its ownership structure to include a third shareholder.
Previously, Ziaida Tolpekina and Olga Orlova were listed as holding a 50% share each, but the company is now broken up into 50%, 37.4% and 12.6% stakes, according to reports citing an FAS document obtained by local publications AKTR and Marker.
This document did not disclose identities of the owners behind its new shareholder structure.
But reports speculate that the incoming shareholder could be Russia’s Gazprom-Media Holding, which never finalised plans announced in late 2009 to take a controlling stake in Tricolour. Indeed, Alexander Makarov, Tricolor’s general director, was cited last month suggesting this 2009 deal could be put back on the table.
Gazprom-Media was not immediately available to comment.
Back in November 2009, Gazprom-Media said a Tricolour acquisition would bolster the services of its existing DTH platform, called NTV-Plus. At the time, the aim of the transaction was to enable Tricolor to access NTV-Plus’s premium content at discount prices, while also giving NTV-Plus, aimed at more affluent subscribers, a wider reach.
Gazprom-Media was founded as a subsidiary of Russian energy giant Gazprom in 2000, when it acquired the local NTV media group.
Tricolor reportedly has around ten million subscribers, and had a net income of Rb82m (US$2.6m) for 2010.
The company has been offering digital TV services since 2005 throughout the European part of Russia, where it uses capacity from Eutelsat W4 and Eutelsat W7 at 36E. It has covered the Urals, Siberia and the Far East since 2007, using Bonum-1 at 56E.
