Halliburton May Sell Baker Hughes' Offshore Fluids Unit

(Bloomberg) -- Almost 16 months after announcing its takeover of oilfield services rival Baker Hughes Inc., Halliburton Co. is adding yet more assets to the list of businesses it plans to sell to appease antitrust regulators who’ve been stalling the deal.

Halliburton plans to divest Baker’s offshore drilling-and- completions fluids division and the bulk of Baker’s completion systems, according to people familiar with the matter. The units join two other batches of overlapping business lines that Halliburton has said it will sell to assuage the U.S. Department of Justice’s concerns that the deal will hurt competition.

It’s not clear at this stage how much the new assets Halliburton is looking to sell may fetch, the people said, asking not to be identified as the process isn’t public.

Dave Lesar, chief executive officer at Halliburton, told analysts and investors on a conference call last month that the companies presented a new plan to the Justice Department earlier in January to sell more assets. He declined on the call to name which ones.

Melanie Kania, a spokeswoman at Baker Hughes, and Emily Mir, a spokeswoman at Halliburton, declined to comment.

Halliburton agreed to buy Baker Hughes in November 2014 in a cash-and-stock deal that at the time was valued at about $35 billion. The transaction was scheduled to close last year, but has been delayed to no later than April 30 as the companies seek to resolve antitrust concerns in the U.S. and abroad.

Baker Hughes traded 1.4 percent lower at $42.24 at 12:55 p.m. in New York, valuing the company at about $18.4 billion. Halliburton fell 5 percent to $29.29.


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