Royal Dutch Shell PLC, Europe’s largest oil company, offered to buy African explorer Cove Energy PLC for £994.4 million (US$1.6 billion) to expand in Mozambique and Kenya.
Shell is offering £1.95 for each Cove share, a 26 percent premium to the closing price of the London-based company on Tuesday, according to a statement.
Cove’s board said separately that it expected to recommend the proposed acquisition.
Cove put itself up for sale last month after reporting one of the world’s largest gas discoveries in a decade off Mozambique.
Cove holds an 8.5 percent stake in the Rovuma Area 1, which holds 425 million to 850 million cubic meters of recoverable gas, enough to justify production of liquefied natural gas for Asian markets.
The discovery is operated by Anadarko Petroleum Corp.
“This is a much better price than the market anticipated and will likely not see” another bidder, said Stuart Joyner, an analyst at Investec Securities in London.
Cove rose as much as £0.3875, or 25 percent, to £1.9325 a share, in London trading. The shares were at £1.9225 at 8:08am. Shell gained 0.3 percent to £23.11 in London.
Cove has already been working with Total SA and BG Group PLC to explore off the coast of Kenya.
Last year, it joined Cairn Energy PLC to bid for exploration licenses off Lebanon.
Shell, which joined forces with Petroleo Brasileiro SA of Brazil last year to search for oil and gas off Tanzania, has been unsuccessful so far in East Africa.
The Anglo-Dutch company plans to increase spending on exploration 35 percent to about US$5 billion this year.
Cove has received “a lot of serious interest” from national and international oil companies, John Martin, a managing director at Standard Chartered Bank, which is advising Cove on the sale, said on Tuesday. Morgan Stanley is acting for Shell.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
TRANSFORMATION: Taiwan is now home to the largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, thanks to the nation’s economic policies President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday attended an event marking the opening of Google’s second hardware research and development (R&D) office in Taiwan, which was held at New Taipei City’s Banciao District (板橋). This signals Taiwan’s transformation into the world’s largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, validating the nation’s economic policy in the past eight years, she said. The “five plus two” innovative industries policy, “six core strategic industries” initiative and infrastructure projects have grown the national industry and established resilient supply chains that withstood the COVID-19 pandemic, Tsai said. Taiwan has improved investment conditions of the domestic economy
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day