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Italy's Seat to buy Eniro
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April 23, 2001: 11:07 a.m. ET
Italian phone book publisher to buy Sweden's Eniro to expand European coverage
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LONDON (CNN) - Italy's Seat Pagine Gialle has agreed to buy Eniro, the Swedish yellow pages unit, for $2.7 billion to expand its pan-European footprint.
Italy's biggest phone book publisher plans to offer 12.25 Seat shares for each Eniro share, valuing each share in Eniro at 164 Swedish crowns ($16.26), a premium of 35 percent on Friday's closing price.
Seat Pagine Gialli, the multimedia arm of Telecom Italia, said on Monday the total value of the offer is about 27 billion Swedish crowns.
"The proposed merger will strengthen Seat's position as the leading pan-European provider of yellow pages and business information offline and online," the company said. Eniro recommended the offer to its shareholders.
Seat shares fell 11.7 percent to  1.30 in afternoon Milan trade while Eniro shares rose 3.7 percent to 125.50 crowns in Stockholm.
Telia, Sweden's dominant phone company, owns 49 percent of Eniro.
Eniro is the Nordic region's leading provider of online and offline directories and is present in Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Russia, Belarus and the Ukraine.
"We're seeing a lot of consolidation in this market and Seat is leading the way," Staffan Engdegard, analyst at consultancy Jupiter MMXI, told CNN. "There are rumours that it is looking at BT's Yell as well," he said, referring to British Telecommunication's online directory Yell.com.
"Eniro is quite strong in the online world, it's into wireless and has developed location-based services, and it provides good coverage for Seat in the northern part of Europe," Engdegard added.
Under the terms of the offer, each Eniro shareholder would have the option of selling up to 1,000 shares to Seat for 164 crowns per share in cash. The company is also offering 63.80 crowns cash for each outstanding Eniro subscription right.
Compared with the share price at Eniro's initial public offering in October 2000 of 84 crowns, the offer represents a premium of about 95 percent. 
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