NYSE chief meets with holders to 'get vote done' on takeover

NYSE Euronext Chief Executive Officer Duncan Niederauer said he’s meeting with shareholders almost every day to build support for the exchange operator’s takeover by Deutsche Boerse.

“We’re going to hear them out and see what’s required to get the vote done on July 7,” he said today during a Bloomberg Television interview at the Milken Institute Global Conference in Los Angeles. “We know shareholder value creation is our number one objective.”

Deutsche Boerse, based in Frankfurt, agreed to buy NYSE Euronext of New York on February 15 to create the world’s largest exchange owner. Nasdaq OMX Group, based in New York, and Atlanta-based IntercontinentalExchange announced a rival bid on April 1, which NYSE Euronext directors have twice rejected. The Nasdaq OMX-ICE offer was valued at $41.85 a share as of 4.24 pm New York time, 7.9 per cent more than Deutsche Boerse’s $38.79-a-share agreement.

The “spread between the offers seems quite large even if it was obvious that one deal was riskier than the other,” Ian McDonald, a Baltimore-based US exchanges analyst at T Rowe Price Group, NYSE Euronext’s biggest owner with a 7.3 per cent stake on December 31, said in an April 10 interview. He spoke when the difference between the offers was about 15 per cent. “Shareholders can’t and hopefully won’t ignore that,” he said.

“I don’t object to T Rowe Price or anyone else making comments like that,” Niederauer said today. “They deserve to be heard. We should listen to them.”

Nasdaq OMX and ICE said yesterday they intend to take their offer directly to NYSE Euronext shareholders, turning their proposal into a hostile bid.