ProSiebenSAT1, one of Germany’s biggest free-to-air broadcasters, is to be sold by the end of the year for a minimum of three billion euros ($4 billion), the business dailies Handelsblatt and Financial Times Deutschland reported on Monday. ”We won’t sell our shares for less than three billion euros,” Handelsblatt quoted a source close to ProSiebenSAT1’s current shareholders as saying.
The newspaper said that of the five candidates still in the running to buy the broadcaster, the best placed appeared to be the Turkish radio and television group Dogan. ”I can’t rule out that other bidders might offer a higher price, but we wouldn’t then follow,” the supervisory board chief of Dogan, Aydin Dogan, told FT Deutschland however.
ProSiebenSAT1 was an opportunity “that you don’t come across every day. But we do our sums soberly,” Dogan said. The bidders are being allowed to examine the books of ProSiebenSAT1 until December 12. The group’s current owners, a group of investors around the US-Israeli billionaire Haim Saban first tried to sell ProSiebenSAT1 to newspaper publisher Axel Springer at the beginning of this year. But the deal was blocked by competition authorities. Springer recently announced it had taken a stake in Dogan.
