VW in talks to sell stake in used car platform Heycar to Daimler

FRANKFURT (Reuters) - Germany's Daimler is in advanced talks to buy a stake in Heycar https://hey.car, a used-car portal set up last year by its bigger German rival Volkswagen, a spokesman for Volkswagen Financial Services said on Wednesday.

Daimler declined to comment.

German business daily Handelsblatt was first to report on the talks.

The Stuttgart-based luxury carmaker is seeking a 20 percent stake in talks that could culminate in a deal announcement next week, Handelsblatt reported, citing unnamed sources.

Heycar was founded last October and has around 300,000 cars on offer, Handelsblatt said. It competes with German market leader mobile.de https://www.mobile.de and rival Autoscout.24 https://www.autoscout24.de, which is run by Scout24.

Autoscout, which is present in several European markets, had around 3 million active listings at the middle of the year, of which 1.2 million were in Germany.

(Reporting by Ilona Wissenbach and Douglas Busvine; writing by Edward Taylor editing by David Evans and Louise Heavens)