eBay buys Gmarket stake, makes tender offer

SEOUL (Reuters) - South Korea's Interpark Corp (035080.KQ) said on Thursday that it would sell $350 million worth of Gmarket Inc GMKT.O shares to eBay Inc (EBAY.O), making the U.S. online auctioneer a dominant player in South Korea.

EBay would buy a 29 percent stake, or 14.6 million shares in Gmarket from Interpark, its current top shareholder, at $24 a share, the Korean company said in a filing.

Interpark said eBay would make a tender offer for the remaining shares in Gmarket.

Yahoo Inc (YHOO.O), which holds a roughly 10 percent stake in Gmarket, agreed to tender its stake in Gmarket to eBay.

If all outstanding shares are tendered, the purchase would amount to a total of $1.2 billion, according to eBay.

The $24 a share price represents a 20.2 percent premium on Gmarket's latest closing price of $19.96 a share.

Nasdaq-listed Gmarket runs customer-to-customer marketplaces and has more than 10 million registered users in South Korea. It competes with eBay's South Korean unit, Internet Auction Co.

EBay had already won conditional approval from South Korea's antitrust watchdog on the Gmarket deal. When combined, Gmarket and Internet Auction would have 87 percent of the country's online customer-to-customer market.

Shares in Interpark were down 1.61 percent as of 0240 GMT, underperforming the junior Kosdaq's .KQ11 2 percent rise.

(Reporting by Rhee So-eui and Marie-France Han, Editing by Jonathan Hopfner)