Time Warner Cable (NYSE: TWC) shareholders have approved the company's $56.7 billion takeover by Charter Communications (NASDAQ: CHTR).
The preliminary vote count at TWC's special shareholder meeting today comes after Charter announced in May that it intends to acquire both TWC and Bright House Networks to form the second biggest U.S. cable company behind Comcast (NASDAQ: CMCSA).
Separately, Charter shareholders are also set to vote today on the $10.4 billion Bright House proposal, as well as the related sale of $5 billion in stock to Liberty Broadband.
The shareholder votes come just over a week after the FCC started its regulatory review of Charter's purchases.
In a note to investors, New Street Research said that while Charter CEO Tom Rutledge has said the deals will close this year, a more plausible timeline calls for a February-March close.
"The bigger question is whether the relative quiet about the deal holds," New Street Research wrote in a note to investors. "With many of the problems Comcast faced [in its attempted acquisition of TWC] either non-existent or much smaller, and with the interconnection issue put to the side through a deal with Netflix, the kind of opposition that had already surfaced to reject the Comcast deal has not yet surfaced, and we think it unlikely that the opposition will be sufficient to block the deals."
For more:
- visit this Time Warner Cable investor relations page
- read this New York Times story
- read this Reuters story
Related articles:
Charter investor sues over TWC/Bright House purchase, alleges Liberty is getting sweetheart deal
Charter beefs up D.C. lobbying ranks as merger reviews get underway
Charter says it will 'go further' than net neutrality for merger approval