Superloop has rejected Aussie Broadband's $466 million takeover offer, with the telco's board of directors saying the proposal undervalues the company.
"The Board of Superloop, has together with its retained financial and legal advisers, considered the offer and believes the Indicative Proposal is opportunistic and fundamentally undervalues Superloop," said the company in a statement. "Consequently, the board does not intend to engage with Aussie Broadband on the Indicative Proposal."
Aussie Broadband proposed the deal this morning, saying would allow the company to scale and better compete with players like Telstra, TPG, and Optus.
The deal would have seen Superloop shareholders receive 0.21 Aussie Broadband shares for each Superloop share they held. This implied a value of $0.95 per Superloop share (a 33.2% premium to Superloop's volume-weighted average price of the last three months), but today's news saw Superloop's share price spike to $1.
Aussie Broadband declined to comment.
Mergers and acquisitions are an attractive option for growth in the telco world, as organic customer acquisition is a much slower prospect. Short of "churn events" like the Optus outage or the recent wholesale NBN price rise, customer growth happens gradually.
Aussie Broadband and Superloop have both used acquisitions to increase their NBN customer bases. Aussie Broadband bought Uniti's NBN customers last year, while Superloop acquired Exetel in 2021. Superloop also bought MyRepublic's customers when it exited the Australian market at the end of 2022.
Update 27/02/24: Updated to note that Aussie Broadband declined to provide comment
Alex Choros
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