Izvor: N1 televizija, 19.Sep.2018, 08:52 (ažurirano 02.Apr.2020.)
The state as a cable operator
Telekom Serbia’s CEO has said that the company is negotiating the possible purchase of a number of cable operators. Bearing in mind the many abuses in the spending of public funds in state-owned companies and pressure by the authorities on the media which have been recorded repeatedly in European Union annual reports on Serbia’s progress towards me
“Will the cable operators that the Telekom Serbia CEO has mentioned be bought at market or highly inflated prices”, just >> Pročitaj celu vest na sajtu N1 televizija << so they can be bought at any cost and “will the Telekom, if it buys operators that are currently offering viewers N1 TV, keep the station on the list of offered channels or will it be removed from the offer”.
Instead of replying to legitimate questions as a public company, Telekom Serbia is clouding the issue and describing the questions from N1 as an inappropriate gesture which is the result of attacks by unfair competitors and called N1 to research market prices. The question about the future offer of the mentioned operators was repeated by N1 to Telekom Serbia directly. This is the entire Telekom reply:
“Because of the business policies of your owner, Telekom Serbia was not able to broadcast a large number of attractive channels such as for example Fox channels and Sport Klub which we expressed an interest in on several occassions. Specifically, in terms of Fox channels, your owner has bought the exclusive rights to technology that it does not use (IPTV) with the sole aim of preventing Telekom Serbia, as the user of that technology, from offering Fox channels to its viewers. The answer to your question about whether we will air the channels you are asking us about depends on the readiness of your owner to stop abusing his dominant position on the TV content distribution market. If the owner of your channel is interested in having N1 TV, and the other channels which he owns or has exclusive rights to, broadcast on our platform, we are open to negotiations, under market conditions.”
By clouding the issue once again and presenting private distributors and the state as a media distributor as equals, Telekom Serbia has avoided answering a clear question from N1 TV. N1 is an independent media and is very concerned for the future of its own distribution by operators whose majority owner could turn out to be the state and has nothing to do with the business policies of its investor. Since Telekom Serbia is a public company, with the state as a majority owner and has access to public funds, all media, including N1 have the right to ask questions about that company’s business operations, regardless of who its owner is.
N1 took Telekom Serbia’s suggestion and research the way that the value of cable operators is calculated and the practice used to get to market prices. Undoubtedly, it is up to the buyer to pay what he wants for a company. It would, however, be unusual to see a transaction on the Serbia market which would significantly differ from the purchases and sales in the rest of the world over the past few years. On average, companies which have changed owners in the past decade have reached prices which are 9.7 times higher than their EBITDA (EV/EBITDA coefficient), less the company’s debts. If any operator on the Serbian market were to be bought by the Telekom Serbia at a price drastically higher than that formula, and TV N1 removed from its offer, N1 would be certain that the entire operation was undertaken under orders from the majority owner, that is the state, to drastically reduce the reach and viewing of N1.
TV N1 will carefully follow the announced purchases and if that is the outcome, it will inform all relevant local and international organizations focused on the state of the media field in Serbia.
