Tokyo Stock Exchange Group Inc.'s tender offer for its Osaka rival succeeded, with the number of shares committed exceeding the maximum sought.
The TSE's operator received offers to sell 215,057 of Osaka Securities Exchange Co.'s 270,000 outstanding shares. The offer price of ¥480,000 per share represents a premium of 9.7 percent compared with OSE Co.'s closing price Wednesday of ¥437,500.
Owning 67 percent of OSE Co.'s outstanding shares means the TSE Group won't need the support of any other holders to pass a resolution approving the merger of Japan's two largest equity trading venues. The deal is the first step toward the government's plan for a "comprehensive" exchange handling equities, commodities and other securities.
"Getting the maximum offer would mean the merger will go smoothly," said Mitsushige Akino of Ichiyoshi Investment Management Co. "Shares can be easily obtained in the upper range of the tender if the offer price is above the fair price."
If the deal is completed in January as projected, it may be the first tieup between stock exchanges after regulators scuttled more than $30 billion in exchange takeovers globally since 2010.
"It passed one of the processes needed for the merger, as expected," said Sadakazu Osaki, head of research at Nomura Research Institute Ltd. "The current share price isn't that much lower than the offer price, so there may have been a lot of investors who chose to take profit at an early stage. You can hold onto the shares in hopes for growth in the merged company, but there are a lot of uncertainties."