Telecom Italia board backs Poste's takeover offer

ROME, July 18 (Reuters) - Telecom Italia's (TIM) board on Saturday unanimously approved Poste Italiane's voluntary public tender and exchange offer for all of the company's shares.

Poste became TIM's largest single shareholder last year with a 20% stake in the company. It launched a bid in March for the shares it does not already own.

"The board unanimously deemed the consideration offered fair from a financial point of view and positively assessed the rationale and business prospects of the operation and its consistency with the path undertaken by TIM," the company said in a statement.

Poste, whose 12,600 post offices distribute pensions, is betting that its bid of more than €13 billion ($14.9 billion) for TIM will accelerate its expansion into digital, telecoms and cloud services.

Two-thirds owned by the Italian state, Poste began its digital transformation in the early 2000s by moving into electronic payments. Over the past decade, it has enrolled 30 million users, roughly 70% of the total, in Italy's digital identity system, which allows access to public services online.

Poste argues the tie-up will create a larger state-backed group that can build distributed computing infrastructure across the country.  

($1 = 0.8742 euros)

(Reporting by Angelo Amante in Rome and Ruchika Khanna in Bengaluru; Editing by Kirsten Donovan)