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Carphone Warehouse reportedly offers £250 million for Tiscali UK

by Scott Bicheno on 7 May 2009, 14:17

Tags: Carphone Warehouse, Best Buy (NYSE:BBY), Tiscali

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Finally...?

On the anniversary of Tiscali first putting itself up for sale, the troubled Italian ISP could be finally being put out of its misery, according to reports in the Financial Times today.

It looks like Carphone Warehouse (CPW) has put in an informal offer of £250 million for Tiscali, having been linked to a bid for twice that amount a year ago. If it's accepted, Tiscali shareholders will have mixed feelings, with BSkyB having also been in the running until recently and shares trading at a fraction of their value of a year ago.

CPW, which uses the Talk Talk brand for its ISP operations, stands to overtake Virgin Media as the UK's second largest ISP behind BT if the deal goes through. Tiscali also owns the Nildram, Pipex and Freedom 2 Surf ISP brands in the UK.

Incidentally the FT is also reporting today that the retail arm of CPW, which is jointly owned by US technology retailer Best Buy, is scaling down its plans to open 100 ‘big box' joint-venture stores in the UK.

It cites Best Buy International CEO Robert Willet as the source of the update and said the number is likely to be more like 80 now. As with previous revisions of its European ambitions, Best Buy is blaming the global economy and seems to be adopting a wait and see strategy.

 



HEXUS Forums :: 8 Comments

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Well as a Tiscali ADSL subscriber I hope this finally goes through - not that I've had any problems related to the hunt for a buyer and the financial situtation Tiscali are in - however I don't think it would do any harm and it may well mean there is more investment available to offer new services.

Tiscali seems to have a really bad reputation and although it's not been 100% plain sailing with them I'm pretty happy with the service. What do you expect when you get line rental, anytime UK free calls and ADSL Max for less than £20 a month.
bradyjames
What do you expect when you get line rental, anytime UK free calls and ADSL Max for less than £20 a month.
I'd expect nothing less than great service.
Tiscali are really quite brutal with their throttling. Back at home we where with them as tiscali and then the service got worse and worse so we switched to nildram which was awesome…. until tiscali bought them and then they went crap. Finally we switched to aquiss which has been awesome until recently when their prices went up :(
Biscuit
Tiscali are really quite brutal with their throttling. Back at home we where with them as tiscali and then the service got worse and worse so we switched to nildram which was awesome…. until tiscali bought them and then they went crap. Finally we switched to aquiss which has been awesome until recently when their prices went up :(

kinda in same boat on pipex(also bought bt tiscali) had no problems before now i sometimes cant even keep msn online
Biscuit
Tiscali are really quite brutal with their throttling. Back at home we where with them as tiscali and then the service got worse and worse so we switched to nildram which was awesome…. until tiscali bought them and then they went crap. Finally we switched to aquiss which has been awesome until recently when their prices went up :(

Well I must be quite lucky then because I only seem to suffer throttling on P2P. Browsing and direct downloads are really quick almost all the time. It certainly seems as quick as it was when I was with Eclipse before I moved to Tiscali. Reliability has also been good - again I would say as good as it was when I was with Eclipse.