European shares dipped on Monday as investors digested news that the German government was selling up to 4 billion euros worth of shares in Deutsche Telekom and as news of weak Asian profits hit Philips . KfW, a German state-owned bank, said it will sell the Telekom stake to institutional investors. Dealers said the stake was being sold at 15.05 to 15.20 euros, below Friday's close. The stock eased 0.8 percent to 15.10 euros in early trading. "Recent stake sales in other companies had seen strong demand despite being tightly priced and so it is a surprise that this is being done at a slight discount," said a dealer. "It should easily sail through." Separately, Telekom said over the weekend it is bidding 2.9 billion euros for the 26 percent it does not own in T-Online International , pulling the Internet service back into the fold 4 years after selling stock to the public.
T-Online shares rose 1.2 percent to 9.1 euros. By 0713 GMT, the FTSEurofirst 300 index <.FTEU3> was flat at 1,009.08 points. The DJ Euro Stoxx 50 index <.STOXX50E> was also little changed at 2,813.8 points. Shares in Dutch electronics group Philips dropped on news that quarterly profits at LG.Philips LCD <034220.KS> of Korea, reported lower quarterly profits due to a glut of flat screens on global markets. Philips has a large minority stake in the Asian group.
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U.S. light, sweet crude oil futures were trading at $53.28 a barrel, just shy of last week's all-time high of $53.40, helped buoy shares in oil producers like BP and Total . Oil prices were bolstered by persistent anxiety over OPEC member Nigeria and the nearly month-long loss of a quarter of U.S. Gulf of Mexico production, traders said. Among the other standouts, French engineering group Alstom rose after it announced on Saturday it had won a contract to supply 60 trains and 180 freight engines in China worth 1 billion euros ($1.23 billion). But UK supermarket group J. Sainsbury dropped 2 percent to 247p after saying it expects first-half pre-tax profits to come in considerably below an already-reduced forecast from Merrill Lynch brokerage. The U.S. bond market is shut on Monday in observance of Columbus Day holiday but the U.S. stock market is open. In New York on Friday, the Dow Jones industrial average <.DJI> ended down 0.7 percent at 10,055.20 points, and the tech-laden Nasdaq Composite <.IXIC> finished off 1.47 percent at 1,919.97 points.////www..com