THE Land Bank of the Philippines (LandBank) said its new offer price to buy the majority stake in the Philippine Dealing System Holdings Corp. (PDS) is at P215 per share, from P360 per share earlier in the year.
LandBank President Alex V. Buenaventura said its new offer price of P215 per share was agreed upon by its board members to acquire the majority of the shares of PDS, coming from an earlier offer to buy at P360 per share.
“Yes, LandBank’s new offer to buy is at P215 per PDS share provided any excess over net assets of P980.61 million will accrue to existing owners. Offer period is up to end-December 2018,” Buenaventura said.
He expressed confidence that majority of the PDS shareholders would still take the offer, pointing out that previously, at an offer price of P360 per share, 43 percent of shareholders were willing to sell their stakes.
“We’re confident they will still accept our offer because before, at P360 [per share], 43 percent already gave their acceptance letters. So we will issue offer letters between now and the end of the month, a lower offer at P215. We hope they will accept; there is no reason why they should not accept because the premium is the same. Remember, the P360 [per share] is at a P1.5 billion net asset value. They made dividends of P600 million, so we have to revise our offer based on the lower net asset value,” he added.
He said LandBank will issue its offer by the end of this month, and expressed hope that shareholders give their acceptance letters within November, enabling LandBank to get its share target of 66.67 percent by the end of the year.
In August this year, LandBank said it would be releasing its response to the decision of the PDS to accept the bank’s offer to buy shares from its stakeholders at P360 per share.
He said LandBank will have to change the amount it has to offer per share, under its share-purchase agreement, since the PDS declared on June 28 that it still has dividends amounting to around P600 million.
The declaration was seen to affect negotiations in a way, since the declaration of the dividends will affect the company’s net asset value. The net asset value is the final value of a mutual fund, which is derived by deducting the fund’s liabilities from the market value of all of its shares and then dividing by the number of issued shares.
In March this year, LandBank reported the total acquisition cost of the 66.67-percent common shares of the PDS at P360 per share will reach P1.5 billion.
The Philippine Stock Exchange, the owner of the equities-trading market, said in the same month that it does not intend to engage the government in a bidding war to buy PDS, the company that owns the fixed-income trading platform.