Analysts from the investment bank Goldman Sachs value Arcor at just under 24 billion euros ($22 billion), the newspaper said.

Preparations for an initial public offering, scheduled for December, were under way within the company and the issue would be discussed at a supervisory board meeting in September, FT Deutschland added, stressing that no official decision had yet been made.

A spokesman for the group's parent company Mannesmann, Manfred Soehnlein, told AFP that neither the British mobile phone operator Vodafone which owns Mannesmann nor Mannesmann itself had decided that the flotation would take place in December.

He also refused to confirm whether the offering would be on the agenda of the September supervisory board meeting.

Minority shareholder in Mannesmann Arcor is the German railway operator, Deutsche Bahn.

Societe Generale shares fall 7%
Shares in French bank Societe Generale slid more than seven per cent in Paris on Thursday despite news of a 27 per cent profit rise in the first half and forecasts of a significant rise in profit for the full year.

Bank President Daniel Bouton told a news conference he expected "a significant rise" in net profit for 2000 from 1999. "On June 30 we had already achieved 83 per cent of the profit we made in the whole of 1999. By around September 1 we will have reached 100 per cent of last year's result,"Bouton said. But his remarks, and the fact that first half net profit figures released early Thursday were in line with expectations, showing a 27.6 per cent rise in net profit to 1.64 billion euros ($1.5 billion), were apparently not enough for investors.

Societe Generale shares slid five per cent in the first few minutes of trading and by late morning were down 7.15 per cent at 64.95 euros. "The share rose a fair bit yesterday on expectations of good results, but they came out more or less in line with what analysts were expecting," said an analyst with a Dutch bank here.