Norway's Gjensidige to buy PZU's Lithuanian unit

* Insurer to buy PZU's Lithuanian unit for 54 mln Europe

* Transaction will almost double its Baltic market share

* CEO sees no other big acquisitions in the Baltics (Adds CEO, detail)

OSLO, Feb 3 (Reuters) - Norwegian insurer Gjensidige will buy the Lithuanian business of Polish rival PZU , in a 54 million euro ($61 million) transaction it hopes will almost double its share of the Baltic market.

The purchase of PZU Lietuva should close by the beginning of the third quarter and might be followed by smaller acquisitions in the region, Oslo-listed Gjensidige said on Tuesday.

"Talking about the Baltic area we have a number three position and I do not see any (further) large transactions," Chief Executive Helge Leiro Baastad told Reuters. "Maybe we can find some small bolt-on acquisitions."

Finland's Sampo (Other OTC: SAXPF - news) and PZU - which is Eastern Europe's biggest insurer - will remain the top two insurers in the region, with Gjensidige expecting its market share to rise to around 13 percent from 7 percent.

It expects synergies from the purchase to be realised by 2018, and margins in its Baltic operations to lag group targets until then, Leiro Baastad said.

State-controlled PZU agreed last year to sell part of its Lithuanian business to complete the purchase of British insurer RSA's eastern European operations.

Gjensidige is also keen to expand in the more mature markets of Norway, Denmark and Sweden, though acquisitions there could be hard to come by.

"It's very consolidated so I do not see any large transactions in the Nordic area either, it's about organic growth," Leiro Baastad said.

Shares (Berlin: DI6.BE - news) in Gjensidige traded 0.1 percent lower by 0901 GMT against a 1.8 percent rise in Oslo's benchmark index. PZU shares traded down 0.7 percent.

($1 = 0.8821 euros)

($1 = 7.6279 Norwegian krones) (Reporting by Stine Jacobsen in Oslo, additional reporting by Adrian Krajewski in Warsaw, editing by Terje Solsvik and John Stonestreet)