A logo at UniCredit SpA’s headquarters in Milan, Italy, on Saturday, January 22, 2022.
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Italian lender UniCredit on Monday offered to acquire its domestic rival Banco BPM for about 10 billion euros ($10.5 billion) in a move it says is separate from its pursuit of the German bank Commerzbank.
The deal, if completed, would combine two of Italy’s largest lenders. UniCredit said in a statement early Monday that it is offering 6.657 euros for each share – a slight premium on Friday’s closing price of 6.644 euros.
UniCredit said the purchase, which would be an all-share deal, would allow the bank to “further strengthen its role as a leading pan-European banking group.”
Shares of UniCredit fell 1.7% in early deals on Monday Banco BPM increased by 5%.
The news follows a wave of merger and acquisition announcements in the European banking sector this year. The sector has been seen as ripe for consolidation for years, with cash-rich UniCredit often mentioned as a possible acquirer.
In September, UniCredit increased its stake in German lender Commerzbank to around 21% and filed a request to increase its stake to 29.9%. Earlier that month, the Italian bank had taken a 9% stake in Commerzbank, with half of this stake taken over from the German government.
The German government has yet to bless the potential union, with Chancellor Olaf Scholz saying in a Reuters commentary in late September that “unfriendly attacks and hostile takeovers are not a good thing for the banks.”
Commerzbank’s largest shareholder, the Berlin government, retains a 12% stake after bailing out the lender during the 2008 financial crisis and divesting 4.5% of its original position in early September. Commerzbank shares fell 6% on Monday.
“It’s definitely a surprise,” Kian Abouhossein, head of European bank equity research and global IB coverage at JP Morgan, told CNBC’s “Squawk Box Europe.”
“It’s unlikely he does [UniCredit CEO Andrea Orcel] can perform both transactions simultaneously. This therefore sends a signal that Commerzbank may be having a more difficult time than initially expected.”
Earlier this month, meanwhile Banco BPM itself made a bid for asset manager Anima in a potential 1.6 billion euro deal, and just days later he bought a 5% share of the state-owned company Monte dei Paschi di Siena (MPS).
UniCredit on Nov. 6 reported an 8% year-on-year increase in quarterly net profit to 2.5 billion euros ($2.25 billion), compared with a Reuters-reported forecast of 2.27 billion euros. It also raised its full-year net profit forecast to more than 9 billion euros, compared with a previous forecast of 8.5 billion euros. Shares are up about 55% so far this year.
Abouhossein said that even if Commerzbank and Banco’s BPM deals, for example, were postponed by nine months, this would still be an unrealistic time frame for the transactions.
“You should also remember that from a regulatory perspective there are a lot of execution risks and the regulator will look at the size of the bank, the operational risk and the ability of management to integrate two banks at the same time,” he said. ‘So I think so [Orcel] to protect themselves a little against these transactions.”
— CNBC’s April Roach and Ruxandra Iordache contributed to this article.
Correction: This story has been updated to reflect the correct spelling of Banco BPM.