Liberty Drops Plans To Buy Rest Of SiriusXM

John Malone’s Liberty Media said it has given up efforts to acquire the stake in satellite-radio company SiriusXM that it doesn’t already own, and instead is focused on raising capital for cable company Charter Communications to expand, according to Variety.

The company is creating two new tracking stocks: Liberty Media Group and Liberty Broadband Group. The latter will encompass Liberty’s 27% stake in Charter, plus its 1% interest in Time Warner Cable as well as it subsidiary TruePosition, a provider of location-based solutions for public safety and national security markets. The Liberty Media Group would have attributed to it all of the other businesses, assets and liabilities of the company, including Liberty’s subsidiary Sirius XM Holdings, the Atlanta Braves and Liberty’s 17% interest in Barnes & Noble.

Liberty expects to complete the creation of the new tracking stocks by the third quarter of 2014.

John Malone

“We remain very excited about our investments in the cable sector and Charter Communications,” said Malone, who is Liberty’s chairman, in a statement. “We believe the creation of the Liberty Broadband tracking stock and the concurrent rights offering will provide us greater flexibility to, among other things, support Charter in its expansion efforts.”

Liberty owns 53% of SiriusXM. It announced a plan in January to buy the remaining shares of the company in a transaction worth more than $10 billion, which Malone said at the time would “enable us to focus our energies on the pursuit of new opportunities across the expanded portfolio of Liberty’s businesses and to optimize our capital structure.”

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