If you have $4 billion or so sitting around you can reportedly buy a cable company with 750,000 customers in Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky and Ohio. That, according to a Reuters report, is how much Insight Communications, the nation's 10th largest MSO, expects to get at auction.
The report quoted sources close to the matter as saying that Insight has hired Bank of America Merrill Lynch and UBS AG to run an auction process that would kick off over the next month. Insight is controlled by the Carlyle Group, which, along with leading investors Crestview Partners and MidOcean Partners holds about a 42 percent equity in Insight.
An Insight spokeswoman, quoted in the story, neither confirmed nor denied the report, noting that Insight has "been the subject of those rumors since I can remember" and that the MSO's "goal is to stay focused on building our company and proving all of its products as well as its customer service."
This isn't the first time that Insight has been the subject of an actual sale--or an attempted one. Carlyle bought the company for $2.1 billion in 2005 and put it on the block two years later only to postpone that sale because the credit markets were in turmoil.
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