Prominent investors are merging their businesses — including a Spanish-language cable movie channel and a Puerto Rican television network — to form a new public company to be known as Hemisphere Media Group.
Investment groups InterMedia Partners VII and Los Angeles-based Azteca Acquisition Corp. said they have agreed to combine their Spanish-language properties and financial resources in a transaction valued at $400 million.
Gabriel Brener, a wealthy Los Angeles investor, is contributing the $100 million that Azteca Acquisition, his special-purpose acquisition company, raised in its initial public offering in 2011. Since then, he and his group have been on the hunt for investments in media.
"We have looked at 80 different companies in the last year and a half but none was a perfect fit," Brener said in an interview. "Combining with InterMedia, we thought, made the perfect match."
InterMedia's Spanish-language media assets — the CineLatino movie channel, which is available in 12 million homes in the U.S., Canada and Latin America; television station WAPA in Puerto Rico; and the WAPA America cable network, also in Puerto Rico — will form the backbone of the new venture, which is expected to go public in April. READ MORE
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