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Gold/Mining/Energy : Rogers Cable RCI.B -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: JJ who wrote (4)	4/19/1999 10:16:00 AM
From: Paul Butler	Respond to of 5

Interesting interview with Curt Alexander in Barron's this weekend... Up early this morning...any thoughts? Q: What's next? A: Several years ago we started buying domestic cable stocks when they were out of favor. Now we believe that most of them are fully priced. With industry consolidation under way, cash-flow multiples are at historic peaks and there are no screaming buys. However, some foreign cable stocks offer higher growth at attractive valuations. We especially like Rogers Communications in Canada; NTL, which is based in New York but is big in the U.K.; and Denver-based United International Holdings, a strong play on Europe. Rogers is the biggest cable operator in Canada and also trades on the New York Stock Exchange. At 18 recently, it sold at less than 10 times forward-year 2000 EBITDA, against 14-plus for U.S. operators. If you put a domestic multiple on it, the stock could sell at 25. NTL provides telephony, cable TV and Internet services to residential and business customers in the U.K. over broadband fiber-optic networks. Microsoft recently invested $500 million in the company. It's one of our core holdings that we intend to hold for a number of years. It recently was 83. For a variety of reasons, our interim target is 100 by yearend. About half of United International's subscribers are in the U.K., the rest mainly in Latin America, plus New Zealand. Two months ago, they took public their European unit, United Pan-Europe Communications. Their remaining stake in this subsidiary now is roughly equal to their entire market cap, so you get Latin America and Asia free. The parent, UIHIA, recently was 45. Our target is 70. All three, RG, NTLI and UIHIA, are foreign businesses that operate in non-scary countries and do exactly what their higher-valued domestic counterparts are doing.