(Bloomberg) -- Altice Europe NV has drawn interest from private equity funds including Cinven, Permira and Bridgepoint for its Teads advertising technology firm after kicking off a formal sales process, according to people familiar with the matter.
Several buyout firms made early-stage bids for the video business, which could be valued between 1 billion euros ($1.1 billion) and 1.6 billion euros, said the people, who asked not to be identified as the talks are private.
Teads managers may retain a stake of as much as 20%, said the people. Second-round bids are due around Aug. 5, they said.
Selling Teads would help Altice reduce its 30.1 billion euros of net debt. Altice has successfully offloaded stakes in its towers businesses in France and Portugal and its French fiber-to-the-home venture as part of the debt-cutting push, but a process to sell a stake in its Portuguese fiber network has stalled.
Representatives for Altice, Cinven and Permira and Bridgepoint declined to comment.
Teads Executive Chairman Pierre Chappaz has said he's trying to arrange a leveraged buyout backed by U.S. private equity to take control of the business from billionaire Patrick Drahi's Altice. New investors could give Teads more notoriety to develop its brand, Chappaz said in an interview last month.
Teads develops short videos that sit alongside web news articles and says its content is less intrusive than pop-ups and typically captures a viewer's attention for longer than ads on social media platforms.
Altice owns about 90% of the business, with the rest held by Chappaz and other managers. It bought the company in 2017 in a deal worth 285 million euros.
--With assistance from Dinesh Nair.
To contact the reporters on this story: Angelina Rascouet in Paris at arascouet1@bloomberg.net;Myriam Balezou in London at mbalezou@bloomberg.net;Sarah Syed in London at ssyed35@bloomberg.net
To contact the editors responsible for this story: Rebecca Penty at rpenty@bloomberg.net, ;Dinesh Nair at dnair5@bloomberg.net, Stefan Nicola
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