The offer price of $ 40 per share for Office Depot’s parent company, ODP Corp., is a premium of about 60% over the average closing price of the last 90 trading sessions. The cash transaction, according to Staples, is an “attractive value proposition” and is “superior to Office Depot’s intrinsic standalone value”.
Staples said it is “prepared to take all necessary steps” for the merger to be approved by the Federal Trade Commission, which said in 2015 that the combination would give combined companies a very large share of the retail office supplies market and would violate the antitrust law.
To avoid antitrust scrutiny, Staples proposed to sell its IT management company CompuCom or its business-to-business unit. Doing so could lead Staples to raise the price of the proposal, he said. The regulatory process could take about six months, the company estimated, and Staples is asking the ODP board to “instruct management to cooperate with regulatory authorities as soon as possible”.