21st Century Fox Inc. agreed to acquire the rest of Sky Plc for 11.7 billion pounds ($14.6 billion), in Rupert Murdoch’s second run at Europe’s dominant pay-TV company, as the media billionaire seeks to consolidate his television empire across two continents.
Fox will pay 10.75 pounds a share for the 61 percent of London-based Sky it doesn’t already own, according to a statement Thursday. That represents a premium of 36 percent over Sky’s closing price on Dec. 8, the day before the companies disclosed a preliminary offer. Murdoch is returning after a previous bid was thwarted in 2011 over a phone-hacking scandal at his newspapers.
The deal gives Fox a distribution platform to complement its film studio and cable channels like FX and National Geographic. Sky provides satellite-TV service to 21.8 million customers across the U.K., Ireland, Italy, Germany and Austria, and has been adding exclusive entertainment and original content to its core sports offerings while expanding into broadband and mobile service.
“The combined company will be a global creative and consumer powerhouse,” Lachlan Murdoch, co-chairman of Fox and Rupert Murdoch’s son, said on a conference call.
Murdoch’s Sky bid follows AT&T Inc.’s $85.4 billion deal this year to acquire Time Warner Inc., as traditional media push for scale to combat online video services like Netflix and Amazon Prime. Both deals would establish new beachheads for the companies, combining the delivery of content with the content itself.
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