Thought Leadership
Media reports have been circulating for some time that the Chinese group JD.com is interested in Mediamarkt’s parent company Ceconomy. Now the Chinese have taken the decisive step.
The Chinese e-commerce giant JD.com wants to acquire a major stake in the Mediamarkt-Saturn parent company Ceconomy. To this end, its subsidiary Jingdong Holding Germany GmbH has submitted a voluntary public takeover offer. As expected, Ceconomy shareholders are to receive 4.60 euros per share in cash, Ceconomy AG announced in a mandatory announcement in Düsseldorf. The offer corresponds to an enterprise value of 4 billion euros. This is 43 percent above the average share price of the last three months.
“We are entering into a partnership with JD.com to strengthen European retail based on complementary strengths and shared values,” said Ceconomy CEO Kai-Ulrich Deissner in a supplementary statement. Accordingly, there will be no compulsory redundancies or site closures as part of the transaction. “JD.com will also uphold the existing works agreements, collective agreements and the existing corporate co-determination in the Supervisory Board. These commitments are valid for three years.” JD.com is also not planning any significant changes to the corporate structure or brand architecture.
The largest shareholder of the Düsseldorf-based company to date is the co-founder family Kellerhals with 29.2 percent. In addition, the Meridian Foundation, which holds a stake in the Metro wholesale group, has a good eleven percent, the Haniel family group 16.7 percent and Freenet 6.7 percent.
According to a shareholders’ agreement, the shareholder group Convergenta, which is backed by the Kellerhals family, will retain 25.35 percent of Ceconomy shares after completion of the takeover offer. In addition, JD.com “has entered into agreements with several shareholders of the company in which they have irrevocably undertaken to accept the takeover offer for a total of 31.7 percent of Ceconomy shares (including 3.81 percent of Convergenta)”, it said.
Share already buoyed by takeover fantasies
The Ceconomy share recently shot up to 4.35 euros per share in anticipation of the takeover bid. Since the beginning of the year, it has gained more than 60 percent in the wake of ongoing takeover fantasies.
JD.com, with an annual turnover of almost 159 billion US dollars (2024), sees itself as “a leading global technology and services company with a supply chain at its core and China’s largest retailer by revenue”. The company has been listed on the US technology exchange Nasdaq for more than ten years.
According to its annual report, Ceconomy has more than 1,000 stores in eleven European countries. In the most recent full financial year 2023/24 (to the end of September), the company generated sales of 22.4 billion euros, of which just under a quarter was attributable to online business.
The first Saturn store was opened in Cologne in 1961 and the first Media Markt store in Munich in 1979. The retail chain took over its competitor Saturn in 1990, with Metro AG acquiring a majority stake in both brands a few years later. The retail company Ceconomy, to which the MediaMarktSaturn Retail Group belongs today, was formed in 2017 as a spin-off from Metro.
dpa
