UPDATE 1 - Slovenia's Pivovarna Lasko, Infond Holding Plan To Sell 48% of Mercator by End-March

The plan is to call the tender in one to two weeks, Pivovarna Lasko's public relations officer Jure Struc told SeeNews.

With the sale of Mercator’s shares Pivovarna Lasko will remain with insignificant debts, the company’s CEO Bosko Srot said in a statement. He added that the company is in a “good and healthy” financial state.

Earlier on Tuesday local state-owned news agency STA reported that the Mercator stake that Pivovarna Lasko group is selling is 23.33%.

Shares of blue chip Mercator added 0.28% to an average price of 190.88 euro ($243) on the Ljubljana Stock Exchange (LJSE) on Tuesday. Shares of blue chip Pivovarna Lasko rose 1.06% to 53.16 euro. The statement was released after the end of the trading session.

Also earlier on Tuesday, Reuters reported that Austria's Hypo Alpe Adria banking group has received three letters of intent for the purchase of a 10% stake in Mercator owned by local energy and tourism company Istrabenz.

The bank will decide later this week whether to proceed with the sale, as the letters of intent it has received are “weak due to the current situation on the financial market", Reuters quoted Gerhard Greimer, head of corporate finance department at Hypo Alpe Adria group, as saying.

Market analysts said the shareholders are unlikely to get a good price for their stakes in light of the current situation on the market.

“It is difficult to get a good price in these times,” Andraz Vrh, an assets manager at local brokerage Ilirika, told SeeNews. Vrh said companies need to find new sources of financing and sell assets in order to overcome the crisis.

Mercator had a group net profit of 22.3 million euro in the first half of 2008, up from 21.3 million euro in the year-ago period. First-half group sales rose to 1.282 billion euro from 1.121 billion euro in the first half of 2007.

Pivovarna Lasko reported a preliminary group net profit of 8.92 million euro for the first half of 2008, down from 22.15 million euro a year ago, when it booked financial gains. Group net sales rose by 18.7% year-on-year to 178.792 million euro through June.

($ = 0.7862 euro)