Hudson's Bay joint venture with European retailer Signa Holding



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TORONTO – The Hudson's Bay Company is considering a joint venture in Europe with an Austrian heavyweight that it had previously repelled.

The Canadian retailer said it was in talks with Signa Holding GmbH, a European company that made an unsolicited application. He withdrew the offer early in the year for the German HBC activities, but withdrew the offer earlier this year after being rejected by the HBC board of directors because She was undervaluing the company. "with regard to the exploration of a potential joint venture", but noted that "there is no guarantee that such discussions will ultimately lead to a transaction" and that any transaction would still be subject to approval from the board and to the consents of third parties who

Signa owns Kardstadt, a department store that sells clothing to the home appliance, while HBC operates similar businesses abroad, called Galeria Kaufhof and Gal eria INNO

A potential deal between the two could pave the way for a monopoly of German department stores and points out that HBC still sees the value at Kaufhof, despite its European operations see a 6.6. HBC removed Kaufhof from German distributor Metro AG in 2015 for 3 billion euros (4.5 billion Canadian dollars).

HBC refused to put a representative at his disposal to discuss the potential He said that he issued a statement Friday in an effort to calm recent reports suggesting that he had signed a binding agreement to sell or combine business or properties.

He said that he made public the exploration of an agreement with Signa because "

Some of these stakeholders have quarreled with HBC for years, mostly because of the retailer's recent rocky performance that included a loss of $ 400 million in the first quarter of 2018, compared to Jonathan Litt, chief investment officer and founder of the land activist investor Land & Buildings Investment Management, said: It s & # 39 is complained repeatedly that HBC is a real estate company and not a retailer who has not defined a plan to unlock the "substantial real estate value trapped in the business".

Last month, he issued a note saying that HBC should "

" Hudson's Bay could learn a lot about how Macy's built a credible real estate team to help him to cope with his turnaround, "wrote Litt, at the following address: time. "One might even reasonably ask if the most logical course for HBC at this point would be an acquisition by Macy's rather than trying to catch up."

While Litt spoke openly about The company's real estate, a Lands & Building spokesman declined to comment on Friday about his position that HBC was in talks with Signa

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