DELTA, B.C. – One of the original British Columbia cable systems, Delta Cable, is changing hands.
Persona Communications agreed to purchase the 38,500-customer cable company based in Delta, B.C. (including its Coast Cable operation) late Wednesday. President and CEO of Delta, John Thomas, the son of late company founder Stan Thomas, is said to be retiring.
Financial terms were not released and the deal is pending CRTC approval.
Stan Thomas, one of the industry’s true pioneers, founded the cable company in 1954 and was one of the creators of the Canadian Cable Television Association, which first met in 1957. The company has been in the family’s hands ever since. Thomas even wrote a book on his and his fellow western cablers, called Cable… Vision of the Pioneers, which was published in 1992. He died in January of 2000 at the age of 92.
Delta and the Thomas family have long been industry leaders. Thomas sat on the boards of the CCTA and Canadian Cable Systems Alliance and his system tested myriad equipment for his fellow cable operators. Delta was one of the first cable companies in Canada to provide data and phone services to local government and businesses and was one of the first to go digital.
The acquiring company might come as a surprise to some in the industry since Delta’s systems are, of course, surrounded by Shaw Cable systems and John Thomas serves on the Shaw Communications board of directors.
(Ed note: Thomas has not spoken publicly on the deal yet, but we’d bet he chose Persona in order to keep his employees on the job. If he had sold to Shaw, which already has thousands of employees in B.C., many of the 100-plus Delta staff would likely have been let go. That’s not an indictment of Shaw, it’s just the way things work.)
For Persona, the purchase "is a great opportunity for us," said CEO Dean MacDonald. "It gives us a beachhead in Western Canada, gives us scale and it’s one of the best systems in the country, as most acknowledge." Persona will be keeping Delta’s workers, too.
The deal is follows Persona’s purchase of 25,000-customer Northern Cablevision, based in Grande Prairie, Alberta, in 2005. The conmpany is looking for more acquisitions, said MacDonald.
The privately owned Newfoundland-based MSO runs systems all over Canada and has about 235,000 customers at this time. However, while it still has over 600 headends, the company is rapidly consolidating as many of those as it can and MacDonald noted that 70% of its customers are now served by 32 headends.
