Maurice Lévy, one of France’s most prominent business leaders, today sounded a warning that shareholders in Arcelor, the Luxembourg-based steelmaker with extensive French operations, should be “very cautious” over the surprise hostile bid for the group launched on Friday by Mittal Steel.
After Mittal, the world’s largest steelmaker, stunned the industry with its unsolicited €18.6 billion (£12.8bn) bid for its nearest rival, M Lévy, speaking during to The Times during the World Economic Forum in Davos, said that the move would prove “very sensitive in Europe”, including in corporate France.
M Lévy, who is chief executive of France’s Publicis, the world’s fourth-largest advertising group, suggested it would be inappropriate for either the French Government, or for the European Commission to intervene and impose obstacles to a possible merger. But in a sign of the unease that the Mittal approach has triggered, he urged investors in Arcelor to treat to bid warily.
“I think that the French Government has some interest and some reason to be concerned and I believe that the concern has to be addressed in many different ways - and obviously I think that Arcelor has the means to defend itself,” he said.
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But he added: “I do not believe that a big declaration from the Government or the Commission will be very helpful.”
The Publicis chief, said that what would prove crucial would be the interests of Arcelor shareholders. He suggested that they should treat with some scepticism the offer from Mittal, which is 75 per cent paper, and only 25 per cent in cash, given that it has come from a company which M Lévy argued has only a limited track record against which it can be judged.
“I am not sure I would advise the stockholders to accept paper from Mittal,” the Frenchman said.
M Lévy said he had been surprised by the move from a group whose origins were in India, even though it is British-based, when he had expected such big interventions from emerging markets, a symptom of globalisation, to emerge first from China.
“I am not saying it is positive or it is negative. But it is the kind of thing that we will see more and more.
“I was a little bit surprised personally because I was expecting this kind of hostile bid but coming from China, rather than India. I thought this would come - but I was expecting it to be more from China.”
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He added that Mittal’s decision to make a “quite harsh” bid for a rival would be likely to change the way that emerging market countries led by China and India, and their leading companies, were viewed in the West.
“This is not the behaviour of an emergent country,” he said. “This is something that is coming from a dominant country, which is saying ‘OK, I want to buy you’. The way this decision is presented is quite harsh … solidly hostile.”
He added: “I think it is an Indian deal with a British style.”
M Lévy noted the role of leading British investment banks including the London operation of Goldman Sachs.”We see the skills and the aggression of some very good British bankers,” he noted.
If the bid for Arcelor goes ahead it will create the world’s first producer to make more than 100 million metric tonnes of steel a year, with a global workforce of 320,000 and 61 plants.
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The resulting group would be more than three times larger than its nearest competitor, Japan’s Nippon Steel, and have about 10 per cent of the global.