Reuters is reporting that private equity firm TPG Capital is the leading candidate to buy AT&T’s DirectTV business. The same report says that the bid for the broadcast satellite business would likely be over $15 billion.
Between the debt required for the DirectTV and Time Warner acquisitions, AT&T quickly became one of the most indebted corporations in the world. So the sale would allow AT&T to pay down some of its massive debt load.
The telecommunications and entertainment giant has been on the hunt to find buyers, not only for DirectTV, but for other non-core businesses like its Anime business Crunchyroll which it recently sold to Sony for $1.2 billion.
The deal would highlight the abject failure of AT&T’s acquisition of DirectTV, which occurred in 2014. It valued DirectTV at over $67 billion when including debt, but after shedding subscribers to streaming services for years, the business has become far weaker.
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