By Jui Chakravorty and Georgina Prodhan
NEW YORK/PARIS (Reuters) - Take-Two Interactive Software Inc's (TTWO.O: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz) management again rejected Electronics Arts' (ERTS.O: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz) (EA) $2 billion hostile takeover offer after EA extended its public offer by a month without raising the price.
"This is the same highly conditional proposal that EA offered Take-Two stockholders on March 13, 2008, which our board ... unanimously determined to be inadequate," Take-Two Chairman Strauss Zelnick said in a statement on Monday.
Take-Two, whose "Grand Theft Auto 4" game release earlier this month was one of the most lucrative entertainment launches in history, said its recommendation that stockholders not tender their shares to EA remained unchanged.
The offer, which had already been extended by a month, now expires on June 16.
EA said earlier that about 6.2 million shares, or about 8 percent of Take-Two, had been tendered in the offer and not withdrawn, less than the 6.4 million it had a month ago.
Zelnick said Take-Two was exploring all strategic alternatives and had begun formal talks with interested parties.
EA's head of international publishing, Gerhard Florin, said EA was not desperate to buy Take-Two.
"We don't need Take-Two. We have enough properties of our own. But of course it has well known franchises that would fit pretty well with EA," Florin told the Reuters Technology, Media and Telecoms summit in Paris.
The U.S. Federal Trade Commission had previously asked for more information about the proposed buyout.
Extending the tender deadline will allow the FTC's review of the proposed deal to continue, EA's senior vice president of corporate development, Owen Mahoney, said in a separate statement. Additional details were not immediately available.
Asked whether EA had been impressed by the debut of Grand Theft Auto 4, whose sales topped half a billion dollars in its first week, Florin said: "We are as impressed as we expected."
"Seriously, when we looked at that, when we made up our mind what we should offer, we expected Grand Theft Auto to be a smash hit. It would have been a real issue if it hadn't," he said. "Luckily, it didn't fail."
Take-Two shares slipped 0.3 percent by 1813 GMT to $27.01, still above EA's $25.74 per share offer.
Florin added that any failure to close a deal with Take-Two would not spur EA to a complete takeover bid for France's Ubisoft (UBIP.PA: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz), Europe's biggest games publisher, in which EA owns 20 percent, saying the two were not linked.
"There's no news whatsoever," he said when asked whether EA and Ubisoft had been in takeover talks. "We're happy with their performance as a 20 percent shareholder, and that's it." Continued...
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