Altaba Will Raise $4.3 Billion by Exiting Yahoo Japan Stake

(Bloomberg) -- Altaba Inc., the holding company formed from the overseas investments of the former Yahoo! Inc., will raise about $4.34 billion by selling its entire stake in Yahoo Japan Corp.

The company increased the size of the deal to include its entire 1.36 billion-share holding after initially saying it planned to sell about 750 million shares to raise about $2.5 billion, according to terms of the deal obtained by Bloomberg.

Altaba is offering shares of Yahoo Japan at 354 yen each, representing a discount of 4.6 percent to the stock’s last close, the company said Monday in a statement. Yahoo Japan shares fell as much as 3.5 percent in Tokyo, the biggest intraday decline in a month.

Altaba is Yahoo Japan’s second-largest shareholder with a 23.9 percent stake, trailing only SoftBank Group Corp., data compiled by Bloomberg show. It is Altaba’s second major sale of the Japanese company’s shares this year.

“Yahoo Japan’s equity supply/demand may worsen temporarily as a result, but longer term we expect the outcome will be positive for the firm,” Eiji Maeda, an analyst at SMBC Nikko Securities Inc., wrote in a report.

JPMorgan Chase & Co. and Goldman Sachs Group Inc. are arranging the offering, the terms show.

In February, Altaba warned that it would start divesting what was then a 35 percent stake in Yahoo Japan, fueling a selloff of the Japanese web portal. The two companies in July announced a plan that would blunt the impact of a large stock sale by a big shareholder. The plan involved Yahoo Japan buying back $2 billion worth of its shares in a complicated deal with SoftBank.

Yahoo Japan didn’t immediately return phone calls seeking comment on the sale.

To contact the reporters on this story: Crystal Tse in Hong Kong at ctse44@bloomberg.net;Pavel Alpeyev in Tokyo at palpeyev@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Ben Scent at bscent@bloomberg.net, Amy Thomson, Michael Hytha

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