HHLA shareholders offer MSC almost six percent of the shares

After the regular acceptance period for an MSC purchase offer to the HHLA shareholders has expired, both partners can have an HHLA majority of more than 86 percent. MSC announced this in a mandatory announcement in Hamburg on Thursday. In return, this means that less than 14 percent remains owned by other shareholders – too little to block important company decisions with the so-called blocking minority. The HHLA shareholders now have two weeks until December 7th to tender MSC shares within a legally stipulated “further acceptance period”.

So far, almost 5.9 percent of HHLA shares have been offered for sale to the world’s largest shipping company – as of midnight on Monday. Just twelve hours earlier it was only 3.9 percent. Another almost 10 percent are already owned by MSC. In total, MSC and the city of Hamburg hold 64.86 million HHLA shares. “This corresponds to a total share of approximately 86.23 percent of the company’s share capital and voting rights existing as of the reporting date,” says the MSC announcement.

The city of Hamburg and the world’s largest liner shipping company want to run HHLA as a joint venture in which MSC will hold a maximum of 49.9 percent and the city 50.1 percent. In order for the plan to be realized, MSC had to convince HHLA shareholders to sell their shares to the shipping company at a price of 16.75 euros each.

An important mark for takeover offers is 90 percent. It could be achieved during the remaining acceptance period. Experience has shown that many shareholders only decide to sell their shares at the very end. The threshold is crucial so that the remaining shareholders can then be forced to transfer their shares against their will – the technical term for this is squeeze-out.

MSC and the city have already agreed to strengthen HHLA’s equity capital by a total of 450 million euros. The port logistics company needs a lot of money in the coming years to modernize the container terminals in Hamburg. MSC and the city counter the fears of the employees and the Verdi union by saying that significant commitments have been made for the employees. For example, redundancies for operational reasons would be excluded for at least five years. “It is also stated in black and white for the employees that the existing codetermination will be retained,” it said.

The HHLA shares temporarily gained 0.25 percent to 16.36 euros in XETRA trading.

HAMBURG (dpa-AFX)

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