According to Dow Jones Newswires, Tiscali is back in talks with Carphone Warehouse, hoping to sell its UK assets. Previous rounds of talks failed because the two couldn’t agree on a price. However, as Tiscali’s fortunes have lurched from bad to worse since last year, the price is likely to be considerably lower than the offer it rejected last time round.
Those close to the talks apparently expect the deal to be concluded by the end of this month – time is running out for Tiscali, whose auditors refused to sign off its accounts several days ago.
The report said that if Carphone acquires Tiscali's UK operations, it would put make Carphone the UK’s second biggest broadband provider behind incumbent BT. Carphone’s TalkTalk unit has 2.8 million customers and Tiscali UK 1.8 million. BT has 4.7 million.
Milan-based asset manager Gianpaolo Rivano of GestiRe was quoted by the Dow Jones report saying that the bid value for Tiscali would now be probably be around £350 million, almost half last year's valuation of around £600 million.
