Frasers comes back with another offer for Mulberry

As October dawned, Mulberry’s board made headlines by rejecting a 130p-a-share/£83 million+ possible offer from Frasers Group for the company. Now we’re only 10 days into the month and after Frasers buying around 4 million shares in a fundraising share issue by Mulberry, it’s back with a revised offer to potentially snap up the rest.

The new “possible offer” is for 150p a share and has a value of £111 million. That would add up to a bill of £72 million to Frasers Group to buy the shares it dozesn’t already hold.

Late on Friday it said that after its 130p a share offer for the shares it doesn’t already own was rejected, it has submitted a non-binding indicative offer to the board of Mulberry for the entire company.

Frasers also said it had considered Mulberry’s rejection statement “along with the limited engagement it has been able to arrange with representatives of Mulberry following the initial proposal”. 

And “despite the rejection statement stating that the initial proposal did not recognise the ‘substantial future potential value of Mulberry’, Frasers is clear that there is no current commercial plan, turnaround or otherwise. Frasers also cannot reconcile the rejection… against a subscription price of £1 per share set by the board under the subscription announced on 27 October”.

The company said it has “significant reservations that the £10 million raised under the subscription will be enough to support the business through the near-to-medium term. It is Frasers’ belief that this will lead likely to another capitalisation event within that timeframe unless there is immediate and very real change at the company”.

Along with some other complaints, Frasers referred to Mulberry’s “catastrophic results, its necessity for emergency funding and difficult market backdrop” but said it “strongly believes it can provide the appropriate insulation and investment to support a much-loved British brand. As part of the Frasers portfolio, the Mulberry brand would be provided with the platform to ensure its long-term survival and success”. It added that this is the reason it participated in the subscription.