Lastminute agrees £577m deal with Sabre
12 May 2005
Lastminute.com has agreed to accept a £577 million takeover bid from Sabre Holdings.
The acquisition deal with Sabre, the parent company of Lastminute's rival Travelocity, is likely to see the online travel brand vanish from the marketplace. The deal is being structures as a takeover by Travelocity Europe.
Lastminute agreed a price of 165p a share in cash, representing a premium of 57 per cent on the travel site's closing price of 105p on May 10th. It is less than half the 380p a share the company floated at in March 2000. Sabre is paying a total of £606 million, including debt and cash.
Brent Hoberman, who founded Lastminute in 1998 with Martha Lane Fox, will remain with the merged company as head of the combined operations European business. The Lastminute chief executive owns 4.63 per cent of the company's shares and will receive around £27 million once the company is taken over.
The Sabre bid was announced as part of Lastminute.com's half-year results, which showed that the firm's half-year losses increased to £45.2 million from £39.5million, while total transaction value leapt 57 per cent to £512 million.
Michelle Peluso, president and chief executive of Travelocity, said: "This acquisition would bring together two well-regarded brands and two great teams to create the leading position in European online travel." The deal is expected to complete by July and must first be approved by Lastminute shareholders.
Apply for your free web assessment - get a complete health check and optimisation action plan from Weboptimiser, the experts.
Related news
|
|
Leading brand search engine marketing since 1996
Founded in 1996 as an SEO company, Weboptimiser is today one of the Internet marketing sector's best-known and most respected search engine optimisation (SEO) and pay per click (PPC) search engine marketing companies.
With a unique portfolio of brand-friendly services, including usability, contextual advertising and web analytics, a pioneering methodology that covers all 4 stages of interaction between a web site and its visitors, we make our clients sites faster, smarter, busier and more profitable.
