Lastminute snaps up rival OTC

ONLINE travel group lastminute.com today made an agreed £54.9m takeover offer for rival Online Travel Corporation. The move follows almost two years of on-off talks.

The all-share deal is worth 31p for each OTC share, a 32% premium to their closing price of 23 1/2p last night. But it is still well below the 46 1/2p the shares hit briefly after their stock market debut in June 2000. They slumped as low as 11p after 9.11.

The attraction of OTC to lastminute is its white-label business under which it runs other people's travel websites for them, using their own branding.

Key clients include Thomas Cook, Lunn Poly, The Times, the Daily Telegraph, Tiscali and Freeserve.

About 3.5m people visit sites run by OTC each month. Lastminute said it expects to make savings of £4m a year through the merger and that there will probably be some job losses among OTC's 250 staff.

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