Alaska Air Reportedly Nears Deal To Acquire Virgin America For About $2.5 Bln

(RTTNews) - Alaska Air Group Inc. (ALK ) is expected to announce on Monday that it won the auction for Virgin America Inc. (VA), besting rival JetBlue Airways Corp. (JBLU) in a bidding process that culminated in a cash price of about $2.5 billion, the Wall street journal reported citing people familiar with the matter.

The report indicated that The deal signed Friday night was more than $1 billion over Virgin America's market capitalization on Friday, which had started to rise last month on takeover speculation.

San Francisco-based Virgin America, which began flying in 2007, is 54%-owned by Richard Branson's Virgin Group Ltd. and New York-based Cyrus Capital Partners LP. The company went public in November 2014.