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FRANKFURT, June 24 (Reuters) - Europe's biggest cablecompany, Liberty Global, plans to focus on growing inthe European markets where it is already active, its chiefexecutive told Germany's Handelsblatt.
"There are not many more markets, like Scandinavia, where weare not active. Spain, Portugal and France do not interest us,"Michael Fries said in an interview with the business daily atthe Anga cable fair in Cologne earlier this month.
"We are concentrating on the 12 markets where we are alreadypresent," he said. Liberty is active in 12 European markets aswell as Chile and Puerto Rico.
Liberty - whose brands include Virgin Media in Britain andIreland, Ziggo in the Netherlands and Unitymedia in Germany - isin talks with Britain's Vodafone about exchangingselected assets, Vodafone said this month.
The two most important countries where the two overlap incable and mobile telephony services are Britain and Germany.They also both operate in Ireland, the Netherlands, the CzechRepublic and Romania.
Fries declined to comment on the talks with Vodafone.
He said Liberty Global did not need to buy other companiesto grow in the markets where it already was.
"Our networks reach 50 million households in Europe.However, only 25 million households are customers of ours sofar. We can tap the others without great additional costs."
Asked whether Liberty would be interested in buying smallerGerman cable providers such as Telecolumbus, Pepcom or Primacom,Fries answered: "We could certainly look at these."
Fries said Liberty was investing "insane amounts" in newplatforms, brands and staff.
"If we were to sit back, we would grow by 1 percent a year.But we are moving forward and trying to grow 5 to 8 percent ayear. For a company of our size, that's pretty aggressive." (Reporting by Georgina Prodhan, editing by William Hardy)
