Mirae Asset likely to win Daewoo Securities bidding race: reports

Mirae Asset Securities Co. is the likely winner of the bid for Daewoo Securities Co., local reports said Monday, in a deal that could create a new leader in Korea’s brokerage industry.

In the bid which closed Monday, Mirae Asset, part of the eponymous asset management-focused group, offered to pay about 2.4 trillion won ($2 billion), substantially higher than the amounts that its three competitors have penciled in, Yonhap News said, citing unnamed sources.

The three other bidders are KB Financial Group Inc., Korea Investment Holdings Co. and an employee stock ownership association led by Daewoo’s labor union.

Up for sale is a 43 percent stake in Daewoo Securities owned by the state-run Korea Development Bank, valued at about 1.5 trillion won based on Monday’s closing price of its shares, and a 100 percent stake in KDB Asset Management.

KDB acquired Daewoo Securities in 2000 after the brokerage firm went bankrupt in the midst of the Asian financial crisis in the late 1990s. A previous attempt in 2008 to privatize the securities firm, as well as KDB itself, fell through.

KDB said it would announce a preferred bidder later this week at the earliest.

By Lee Sun-young & news reports
(milaya@heraldcorp.com)