FRANKFURT -- Internet service provider AOL Europe said on Thursday the merger of AOL and Time Warner was a wakeup call for Europe's Internet and media firms but would have no immediate impact on their segmented markets.
"Most large content providers, especially in Germany, are still privately held. So I think the deal made a lot of these companies think," AOL Europe chief executive Andreas Schmidt told Reuters in an interview.
"But I don't see an immediate impact for Europe."
The AOL-Time Warner merger brings together the world's leading Internet services provider (ISP) and the world's biggest media company to create an empire that reaches from magazines and movies into cyberspace.
But the deal is largely US and English language oriented, whereas Europe's online and media markets are marked by their varying languages and cultures.
Many of the key European players, such as the continent's largest media company Bertelsmann AG, are also privately controlled.
Schmidt said AOL Europe, a 50-50 joint venture between Bertelsmann and AOL, hoped to gain content from Time Warner after the US deal, but he added: "We don't have any immediate plans for an initial public offering. It's solely at the discretion of the shareholders to make this decision."
Speculation that AOL Europe could be floated has mounted following the announcement on Monday that AOL and Time Warner had agreed to a merger.
Schmidt said AOL Europe would continue to seek to work with local content providers -- the companies that provide the information and products that Web surfers want -- but would do this more via partnerships than acquisitions.
AOL lags behind Deutsche Telekom AG Internet unit T-Online in terms of customer numbers -- T-Online has over 4 million compared to AOL Europe's 2.8 million -- but Schmidt's company has the advantage of having users in nine countries whereas other ISPs tend to be more focused on one country.
Schmidt said the AOL/Time Warner merger was "absolutely an opportunity rather than a threat" for AOL Europe and that it could help the five-year-old joint venture gain more Internet "eyeballs" via access to Warner's immense content.
"We certainly could facilitate this," he said, referring to AOL taking Warner content onto its Web pages. "The more content and great brands we can offer, the better the service gets."
He said AOL Europe had the full backing of both parent companies to become as successful as possible and that the US merger could help this expansion strategy.
"With the addition of Time Warner, with an array of global brands ... we feel at AOL Europe quite substantially strengthened," Schmidt said.
Schmidt said he thought it would take roughly one year -- or what he termed four "Internet years" of three months each -- to implement the AOL/Time Warner deal.
He said he did not expect the ownership structure of AOL Europe to be affected by the mega-merger of its US partner with Time Warner, which competes in some market segments with Bertelsmann -- AOL Europe's other parent.
"It will definitely stay," Schmidt said of the ownership structure. "We need all the resources of our shareholders to be successful."
He declined to give any outlook figures but said AOL Europe was developing well.
"We are very satisfied with the current development and current growth," he said.
