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PHILIPPINE National Construction Corp. (PNCC), a
government-controlled corporation, is listed on the
Philippine Stock Exchange. It has hundreds of
stockholders whose shares are lodged with the Philippine
Depository Inc. through PCD Nominee Corp., which, in
turn, holds the shares traded through various trading
participants or stockbrokers.
As of
December 31, 2006, PCD Nominee held 10,149,492 shares,
slightly up from 9,408,755 shares as of March 31, 2006.
Of over 10 million shares under PCD Nominee, foreigners
owned 1,485,679 shares and still hold today.
PNCC
shares are being actively traded, even hitting a 30-day
high of P6 as of Friday last week. This performance may
still be below what traders expect of the company being
the operator of South Luzon Expressway and North Luzon
Expressway. But what is probably important as of this
point: its shares are being noticed.
PNCC
management led by chairman and chief executive officer
Arthur M. Aguilar managed to trim the company’s loss in
the first nine months of 2006 by a huge P1,240,259,000,
or 72.178 percent, to P478,064,000 from P1,718,323,000
in the same period in 2005.
That was
its best financial performance in years. Otherwise,
traders and shareholders, who still believe in PNCC
would have left abandoned it many, many years ago. More
importantly, the foreign clients of three foreign banks,
as trustees, are still with PNCC. Citibank N.A. holds
677,929 shares;
Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corp., 327,010 shares; and Standard Chartered Bank,
2,909 shares. The rest of the over 10 million shares
held by PCD Nominee are in listed under the names of
over 100 stockbrokers.
PCD
Nominee is listed among PNCC’s top 100 direct
stockholders along with the Government Service Insurance
System, which owns 47,490,l383 shares. But the
government, through the Asset Privatization Trust is the
biggest owner with 79,271,024 shares, or 83.443 percent
of outstanding 95 million shares consisting of 75
million common shares, 10 million special common shares,
and 10 million preferred shares.
The
market is on a good run but. PNCC has not joined the
current surge; traders and investors want to know why.
What other fundamentals are they missing or fail to
factor in dealing with PNCC? Who in the Senate would
want to provide the answer?
*****
Big
remittance.
Banco de Oro is a member of a syndicate that is raising
P12.6 billion to partially pay for the acquisition by
First Pacific Co. Ltd. of Hong Kong of slightly over
46-percent ownership in Philippine Telecommunications
Investment Corp. (PTIC) from the government. This may be
first big business deal for the newly expanded bank
controlled by SM Group of businessman Henry Sy Sr. An
e-mail from BDO confirmed the bank’s plan to lend to
First Pacific. “BDO is part of the Calyon syndicate that
will finance the purchase of PTIC shares in PLDT,” BDO’s
investor relations officer Chito Reyes, said. “However,
the participation among the syndicate members has not
been finalized to date.”
BDO’s
e-mail suggests the money that was deposited in escrow
intended for PTIC shares three weeks ago did not come
from Metro Pacific Assets Holdings Inc. but from First
Pacific Co. Ltd. of
Hong Kong. As the mother company, First Pacific came to the rescue when its local
unit could not come up with half of the P25.6 billion
acquisition cost of the sequestered PTIC shares. One
banker source said: “The money could come only from
First Pacific.” This means the Hong Kong-based
conglomerate has given the
Philippines’s foreign exchange a big boost with its
remittance of $262.50 million. The amount is only an
estimate of the dollar equivalent of P12.6 billion based
on exchange rate of P48 to a US dollar. |
