Liberty Global delivered on a promise to make more acquisitions, ...

Japan. The purchase of Cablecom, Switzerland’s largest cable operator, will be financed mostly with debt; it’s expected to be completed by the end of Oct. The firm has 2 million video, voice and broadband customers. Liberty is paying less for Cablecom than that firm hoped to raise in an initial public offering (IPO) valuing it at as much as $2.7 billion. “It’s definitely a good deal; it’s lower than the IPO price they were going for,” said Jefferies & Co. analyst Robert Routh. “It’s a continuation of the strategy to recreate TCI on the European continent -- this is something they had been looking at for a while,” said Routh. TCI was the cable operator Liberty Global Chmn. John Malone ran before it was sold to Comcast. Routh urges buying shares of Liberty Media, and owns stock in that company and Liberty Global. The deal will help Liberty Global cut costs in Europe by giving it more heft to negotiate content deals, he said. However, the purchase price as a multiple of Cablecom’s expected 2006 cash flow is higher than other deals and Liberty Global’s value on that basis, said Stifel, Nicolaus analyst Ted Henderson, who has a “market outperform” rating on Liberty Global. He called Cablecom “one of the most attractive cable operators in Europe.”