Welcome back everyone! Some folks at Windstream had a busier holiday week than they probably preferred, as the company finished the year with the sale of a few more non-core assets. Windstream has sold the legacy EarthLink consumer business to Trive Capital.
Earthlink’s consumer business was founded on dialup of course, but also contained a bunch of DSL and other access services as well as value added stuff on top of those products, and served about 600K services. In 2017 that business did about $175.9M in revenue, and in the first nine months of 2018 it generated some $138.3M. It has been a steadily declining business, but one that has consistently put out solid cash flows.
Trive Capital paid some $330M in cash for the business, and says it plans to invest in the brand. That could mean a lot of things, we’ll just have to wait and see what they do next.
For Windstream, the deal further streamline’s the company’s core businesses and improves the company’s credit profile. It was the second deal to turn non-core assets into cash they did in December, the first being the sale of the company’s extra dark fiber in Minnesota and Nebraska to Arvig.
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Categories: CLEC · Mergers and Acquisitions
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$1.100B less $330M = value of remaining assets purchased?
They went for cash to pay short term debt, foregoing free cash flow albeit declining FCF. The problem isn’t the debt ratio — it is FCF and short term debt. This is like Intermedia Communications (now VZB).