The board of the UK warehouse landlord Segro has U-turned and said it would be willing to accept a £14bn takeover by Segro’s bigger US rival, Prologis, in a deal that would be one of the largest foreign takeovers of a UK-listed company.

In the latest blow to the troubled London stock market, Segro said in a statement that its board had “unanimously concluded” it would recommend its shareholders accept what Prologis called its “best and final offer”, made just hours before a deadline.

The statement on Wednesday afternoon, issued after the stock market closed, came nearly a month after the board of the FTSE 100 company, which builds and rents out enormous warehouses to companies such as Amazon and Netflix, rejected an initial £12.6bn approach from Prologis and two subsequent offers.

Prologis’s revised proposal offered 0.092 new shares for each Segro share, valuing the UK company at £10.32 per share. This represents 3.9% more than its previous proposal and a 9.5% increase above its initial approach disclosed in June.

Under the terms of the deal, Segro shareholders would also be entitled to receive a permitted dividend, while the company has also asked Prologis to commit to establishing a secondary listing for Segro on the London Stock Exchange.

Prologis had until 5pm UK time on Wednesday to announce a firm intention to make an offer or walk away, known as a “put up or shut up” (PUSU) deadline under the UK’s takeover code.

This deadline has now been extended by three weeks, and California-based Prologis has until 5pm on 12 August to make a firm offer.

Prologis said it welcomed the additional time and was willing to work with the Segro board to reach an outcome. Its shares fell by as much as 3% during morning trading in New York, before recovering slightly.

Segro’s about-turn came just hours after one of its major investors, Norway’s Norges Bank Investment Management, had urged the UK company to engage with Prologis.

Norges, which had a 1.3% holding in Prologis and an 8.3% holding in Segro at the end of June, said it understood “the strategic rationale for a combination”.

Segro stands for the Slough Estates Group, after the town on the western fringes of London where it began life as the Slough Trading Company in 1920, when a military repair depot was turned into an early example of a modern industrial estate.

Segro now owns 10.9m sq m of space across Europe and its tenants have changed with the times. The company says its Slough trading estate is now home to the second largest portfolio of datacentres in the world.

Both Segro and Prologis – which counts Amazon, FedEx and UPS as customers – have been building out datacentres to tap into the booming AI industry.

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Segro’s business took off and its shares soared during the Covid pandemic when consumers were confined to their homes, creating huge demand for deliveries and putting pressure on warehouse space.

However, its shares began to slide in the spring of 2022 and were trading about 40% lower than their peak before news of Prologis’s first offer was released in June.

Segro had previously turned down bids from Prologis going back as far as March 2024, and called the company’s initial offer “opportunistically timed”, with long-serving chief executive David Sleath insisting it could offer its shareholders “strong prospects” through its pipeline of developments.

Prologis’s final offer for Segro comes amid a rush of overseas bids for British companies that has brought a flurry of deal-making.

British stocks have become cheaper compared with their US counterparts since the start of the Iran conflict, with laboratory testing company Intertek one of the latest FTSE 100 businesses to agree to a takeover after it backed a £10.6bn approach from a private equity firm owned by Sweden’s billionaire Wallenberg family.

The board of the low-cost airline easyJet gave the green light to a possible £5.7bn offer from the US private equity firm Apollo, although a potential EU review of airline ownership has cast a question mark over the deal.