Bank Millennium: For sale

According to Polish daily Rzeczpospolita citing unnamed sources, Millennium bcp is unofficially looking for a buyer for Bank Millennium. The newspaper points out that Portuguese Millennium bcp is obliged to payback € 3bn of state aid in the near future.

Our view:
We believe the news is neutral as Bank Millennium is widely regarded as an M&A target and the bank was officially looking for a buyer back in 2011. Back then press speculation suggested three banks had filed nonbinding offers for the bank: BNP Paribas, PKO BP and Bank Pekao, while Intesa Sanpaolo had also expressed interest. More recently, PKO BP’s CEO Zbigniew Jagiello said his bank may be active on the Polish M&A market in 2013. Previous offers for Bank Millennium were turned down due to low pricing and the press speculated that the minimum price level was set at a P/B above 1.6x. Bank Millennium currently trades at a P/B of 1.2x (Bloomberg consensus) and we would not expect a potential offer to add much premium on top of the current valuation level, which we believe already prices-in some speculative premium.