Telenor closes Bahnhof purchase with 57.5% of shares

Telenor completed its purchase of 57.5% of Bahnhof, a Swedish broadband and colocation provider, paying SEK 62 ($6.25) a share in cash.

The deal closed last week, shortly after Sweden's Competition Authority approved it, Data Center Dynamics reported. Telenor agreed in July to pay SEK 6.1 billion ($610 million) for the stake.

Telenor said it now holds 87.9% of Bahnhof's votes, above Sweden's 30% mandatory bid threshold. The sellers were founders Jon Karlung and Andreas Norman through their wholly owned KN Telecom AB, which held 50.8%, and Investment AB Öresund, which held 6.7%. The remaining 42.5% of shares and 12.1% of votes sit outside Telenor's holding.

For allocators underwriting Nordic fiber and colocation platforms, SEK 62 a share is now a disclosed cash reference price for a business of Bahnhof's size.

Bahnhof, founded in 1994, serves more than 500,000 customers, including about 15,000 enterprise customers, and operates proprietary network infrastructure, access to open networks and five colocation data centers. The company will keep operating under its own brand, Telenor said.

"Building on that position requires greater scale and more resources, and we are convinced that Telenor is the right place to bring both," said Jonas Edén, chief executive of Telenor Sverige AB.