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Voest-Alpine Announcement Concerning Takeover Offer for Boehler- Uddeholm AG - Conference Call - Final.

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Original Source: FD (FAIR DISCLOSURE) WIRE

OPERATOR: Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to today's voestalpine Conference Call. For your information, this conference is being recorded. At this time, we would like to turn the call over to your host, Mr. Peter Fleischer, Head of Investor Relations. Please go ahead, sir.

PETER FLEISCHER, HEAD OF IR, VOESTALPINE AG: Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to our conference call on the occasion of the takeover of Bohler-Uddeholm. With me is our CEO, Dr. Wolfgang Eder, who will give you all the detail and in the following, we are happy to answer all your questions.

WOLFGANG EDER, CHAIRMAN AND CEO, VOESTALPINE AG: Thank you, Peter Fleischer. Good afternoon all from my side, ladies and gentlemen. I just came in from our Supervisory Board Meeting we had today, where we had a discussion, and based on the release of the figures of 2006-07, which you will hear tomorrow in a press conference, and of course, a part of the discussions in the Supervisory Board was also today's outcome of our offer for the takeover of Bohler-Uddeholm.

As you most probably have already noticed via various info channels, we reached our goal of taking the maturity of Bohler-Uddeholm Holding stock. The exact figure as of yesterday evening was 54.6% of the ordinary share capital of Bohler-Uddeholm. So, from today's point of view, voestalpine is more or less the owner of 54.6% of Bohler-Uddeholm. From the legal point of view, I have to add that the offer is still under the condition of clearance from the cartel authorities of various countries. We are expecting clearance at the end of June, beginning of July. So, I think it will happen in due time. In this respect, I want to mention that we do not expect any problems for antitrust reasons. We think everything will go smoothly with respect to antitrust activities. After clearance, we are allowed to pick up the tender shares and by then we are allowed to pay for the stock. So, from today's point of view, this should be within around the next four to five weeks.

Just to remind you on some facts and figures about the offer. voestalpine published a voluntarily public takeover bid to all shareholders of Bohler-Uddeholm AG on the 26th of April this year. The basic price was EUR 69 per Bohler-Uddeholm holding stock. The acceptance period was originally constituted with 19 trading days by the Austrian Takeover Commission. And on May 18, we improved the offer to EUR 73 per share. And according to Austrian law the acceptance period was extended to June the 4th, so to yesterday.

After various critical remarks about the offer price in the first weeks of the offer period in the last days, the capital market, mainly the Austrian capital market, which was clearly the most critical about the intended deal, already anticipated a more positive reaction, which made us feel clearly more comfortable than at the beginning of the offer.

Bohler-Uddeholm was constantly trading beneath our improved offer price of EUR 73,...

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