Coty seeks to woo Avon investors Bart Becht, who as chairman of Coty is trying to buy Avon Products, plans to start wooing the door-to-door beauty group's shareholders in the next two weeks to put pressure on its reluctant board. Mr Becht, who is leading a $10bn bid for Avon, told the Financial Times: "The next steps are really to convince their shareholders that they should talk to the board and have the board engage with us." Avon, a legendary brand that has fallen on hard times due to a string of management and legal problems, swiftly rejected the bid from Coty, a privately owned fragrance group, after it was made public on Monday. We're just amazed and we also don't understand how their board comes to this conclusion of not interacting with us. That's the key thing," Mr Becht said in a telephone interview. The acquisition of Avon and its army of neighbourhood saleswomen would create a new rival to the global beauty giants L'Oréal and Procter & Gamble, whose brands include Olay and CoverGirl. Coty's $4.5bn sales last year were dominated by celebrity-branded perfume and nail polish in the US and Europe, while Avon's $11bn came mainly from make-up and skin products in emerging markets. But Mr Becht stressed how little Coty knew about the extent of Avon's troubles, which have included disgruntled sales representatives, slumping US sales, order fulfilment problems in Brazil and bribery allegations in China being probed by US regulators. He said he would not go hostile by making an offer direct to investors and snubbing Avon's board, because that would leave Coty unable to get answers to vital questions from the company. We could be off by miles in terms of our assumptions, so without thorough due diligence it's just not possible. Mr Becht became Coty chairman in November after more than a decade leading Reckitt Benckiser, the household products group. This week Mr Becht said at least 25 per cent of Avon's shares had changed hands, as many retail investors and some buy-and-hold institutions sold their stock while hedge funds waded in. "We need to let it settle down a bit," he said. We will start talking to shareholders probably not next week, but the week after. Avon shares on Friday stood at $23.42, above Coty's $23.25 offer, a sign that Wall Street expects Coty to raise its bid or, more improbably, a rival bidder to make a counter offer. Before the bid Avon shares had fallen 30 per cent in the previous 12 months while the US market rose more than 5 per cent. Mr Becht said Coty would be willing to raise its offer in a letter on Monday to Andrea Jung, Avon's chairman, who the board is looking to replace as chief executive. But he told the FT that unless Avon allows Coty to look at its books and talk to its executives: "It is very difficult for us to adjust the price, up or down, because we're missing very material, critical pieces of information." Avon said: "The board has been clear that it carefully considered the indication of interest and concluded that it was an opportunistic approach that fails to reflect the full value of the company."