Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer is advising Pearson on the sale of its 50% stake in The Economist group for a total consideration of £469 million

Linklaters has advised The Economist Newspaper on the sale by Pearson plc of its 50% stake in The Economist Group.

Under the deal, worth £469m, The Economist Group has agreed to repurchase 22% of its ordinary shares for £182m.  The remaining shares have been bought by the Italian investment fund Exor - the investment vehicle of the Agnelli family, the owners of Fiat – for £287m.

The deal is expected to complete by the end of 2015, subject to approval of The Economist’s shareholders and independent trustees.

Reed Smith has advised UK-based IT solutions provider the Kelway Group (Kelway) and its majority shareholders in relation to the disposal of the remaining 65% of Kelway to CDW Corporation (CDW).

Milbank, Tweed, Hadley & McCloy LLP represented Axel Springer SE on the sale of its entire 50.1 percent shareholding in runtastic GmbH, an Austrian internet company founded in 2009. Concurrently, the remaining investors, including the founders and management team of runtastic, also sold their participations to the adidas group, which now holds 100 percent of all shares of runtastic. The entire transaction was concluded at a EUR 220 million enterprise value basis.

Mayer Brown has advised the world's leading semiconductor intellectual property (IP) supplier, ARM Holdings plc, on its acquisition of Israel-based Sansa Security, a provider of hardware security IP and software for advanced system-on-chip components deployed in Internet of Things (IoT) and mobile devices.

Sansa Security currently enables security in more than 150 million products a year and its technology is deployed across a range of smart connected devices and enterprise systems, complementing and extending ARM’s security technology capability.

Osborne Clarke has advised digital agency AKOM360 GmbH on the takeover by media communication agency Starcom MediaVest Group (SMG). AKOM360 headquartered in Munich with further branches in Berlin, Düsseldorf and Hamburg provides comprehensive digital marketing services amongst others in the area mobile marketing, app-development, SEO und social media.

Taylor Wessing have advised Arrow Electronics on the recently closed acquisition of SETRON GmbH, a leading components distributor in Braunschweig, Germany.

SETRON has been in the components business for more than 45 years, with a robust line card of 50,000 products ranging from semiconductors to PEMCO. Their sales, distribution and engineering network will expand Arrow's capabilities in Germany, Austria, Hungary, Poland, the Czech Republic and Russia.

TV on the smartphone, tablet or PC – at any time, at any location, this is the new distribution of the mass medium of television. TV Spielfilm, Germany's most widely used digital TV guide of BurdaNews, a Hubert Burda Media company, has started an "OTT (Over-The-Top) Platform" at the end of July, called TV Spielfilm Live. The Internet service allows access to more than 70 stations in best quality (many of them in HD), in full and without any time delay.

Supported by Heuking Kühn Lüer Wojtek, DATAGROUP AG has taken over the employees and customer relations of software and consulting company Vega Deutschland GmbH by way of an asset deal. A team led by Dr. Rainer Herschlein, Partner at the commercial law firm's Stuttgart office, advised DATAGROUP on the transaction. The purchase price was not disclosed.

Travers Smith LLP has advised Access UK Limited, a company backed by Travers Smith’s long standing client TA Associates, on its acquisition of First Choice Software from the founders.