BMW heiress to buy almost 25 percent of SGL

FRANKFURT (Reuters) - Susanne Klatten, Germany's wealthiest woman, plans to take a stake of nearly a quarter in German graphite specialist maker SGL Group (SGCG.DE), her holding company said on Monday, sending SGL shares soaring.

Klatten, who also owns 12.5 percent of premium carmaker BMW (BMWG.DE), is flush with cash from an asset sale and is snapping up other assets amid the market selloff.

The billionaire heiress's swoop on SGL comes a week after a German court sentenced her former lover to six years in jail for trying to blackmail her out of millions.

A spokesman for Klatten's holding company, Skion, said Klatten would use cash-settled stock swaps she owns to lift her stake in SGL to almost a quarter, adding that she "definitely" did not plan to raise her stake further.

Klatten already owns almost 8 percent of SGL shares, the graphite maker said, welcoming her as an anchor investor.

"It has been our strategy for some time to obtain long-term oriented shareholders due to the high volatility of equity markets," SGL Chief Executive Robert Koehler said.

SGL shares surged more than 22 percent and were up 18.2 percent to 20.09 euros by 1230 GMT (8:30 a.m. EDT), hugely outperforming the 1.7 percent gain in Germany's midcap MDAX index .MDAXI.

"She can be seen as a long-term investor who does not need to worry about short-term business cycles," said Commerzbank analyst Dirk Nettling.

"In the long view she's buying into an undervalued company" even though SGL should face headwinds through 2010 amid weak demand from the steel and car industry, he said.

SHOPPING SPREE

A person familiar with the matter said the deal would cost Klatten slightly more than 300 million euros ($387.7 million).

Klatten got more than 2 billion euros from a 4.7 billion euro asset sale at specialty chemicals maker Altana ALTG.DE, of which she held about half at the time, which has given her the cash to buy assets during the financial crisis.

Klatten, 46, bought almost all of the rest of the shares in Altana this year. In November, she announced that she planned to buy the company outright in a deal worth 910 million euros.

SGL said last month it was on track for an "acceptable"

first-quarter profit and that it saw signs of a second-half recovery in the steel industry, its main customer group.

Graphite electrodes, which are built into electric arc furnaces to recycle scrap metal into steel, account for almost half of SGL's revenue.

SGL is looking to reduce its dependence on its best-sellers by trying to boost sales of carbon fibres and composite carbon materials to makers of aircraft, windmills and cars.

CEO Koehler said in January that SGL was set to hit the upper end of its 2008 targets for earnings before interest and taxes (EBIT) to grow by about 20 percent and for sales to expand by 10 percent to 15 percent.

The group is scheduled to release 2008 figures on Wednesday.

(Editing by Karen Foster)