Special situation Quickie: Axel Springer voluntary tender offer EUR 63/share
A few weeks ago, PE big weight KKR had announced to make a voluntary tender offer for German publisher Axel Springer at EUR 63 per share.
It is an interesting case as the offer is targeting only a minority stake. The threshold for the offer is set at only 20%.
The background seems to be that the biggest shareholder, Friede Springer and the CEO Döpfner, who own together ~45% want to make sure that they control the company together with KKR as they have entered into a shareholder agreement.
Looking at the stock price we can see that the offer has been made at a significant premium (~40%) but still below 2018 prices:
There seem to have been other attempts to make sure that Friede and Döpfner control the company but they didn’t succeed.
value and opportunity 