LONDON - In an ongoing battle for Vivendi’s French mobile telephone unit SFR, the French conglomerate Bouygues said on Tuesday that it had extended its revised offer by two and a half weeks and added a breakup fee of 500 million euros, or about $690 million.
Last month, Vivendi agreed to enter into an exclusive negotiation period of three weeks with the Luxembourg-based cable and mobile provider Altice after weighing revised proposals from it and Bouygues.
Vivendi’s board said at the time that it found the Altice offer “to be the most pertinent for the group’s shareholders and employees.â€
Despite that decision, Bouygues, the owner of Bouygues Telecom, the third-largest French mobile operator, didn’t give up hope of acquiring SFR and increased its bid on March 20. Vivendi now has until April 25 to accept the counteroffer.
Bouygues said on Tuesday that it was committed to paying a breakup fee if French regulators were to refuse to approve a Bouygues Telecom-SFR merger, which would reshape the French telecommunications landscape by combining two of the four largest mobile providers, or if the bid were withdrawn based on conditions imposed by regulators.
“This pledge underlines Bouygues’ confidence that it will be able to obtain all the regulatory approvals,†the company said on Tuesday in a statement.
The latest salvo by Bouygues comes as the French market regulator, the Financial Markets Authority, known by its French acronym A.M.F., has called for more transparency in the negotiations by Altice, Vivendi and Bouygues, including disclosing potential breakup fees.
In a statement on Friday, the A.M.F. said Altice, Vivendi and Bouygues, as public companies, were obligated to provide “exact, precise and sincere†information to the market, even if SFR, as a nonlisted company, isn’t subject to tender offer rules in France.
The bidding war has pitted Martin Bouygues, the billionaire who runs the diversified industrial group that bears his name, against the French entrepreneur Patrick Drahi, who since 2002 has built Altice into a global operation with cable and cellphone assets in Europe and the Caribbean.
The potential sale of SFR is part of Vivendi’s efforts to increase its capital reserves and expand its existing media assets, like the pay-television provider Canal Plus. Vivendi had previously considered its own initial public offering for SFR.
In announcing the negotiating window on March 14, Vivendi said that Altice offered to pay €11.75 billion and give Vivendi a 32 percent stake in Altice’s Numericable, which would be combined with SFR. It also provided Vivendi with predetermined exit conditions, Vivendi said.
The exclusive period runs through April 4.
On March 20, Bouygues said that it increased the cash portion of its offer by €1.85 billion to €13.15 billion. The new offer, if accepted, would give Bouygues a 67 percent stake in SFR.
