FIRST Philippine Holdings Corp. (FPH) on Wednesday said it raised some P3.9 billion after it sold a series of its preferred shareholdings on its unit First Gen Corp. at the Philippine Stock Exchange (PSE).
The firm, which holds the infrastructure and power assets of the Lopez family, said it sold through the PSE some 35.68 million of series F preferred shares in First Gen for P110 per share.
“After the sale, FPH will still have 16.74 million series F preferred shares. FPH continues to retain its 66.2-percent ownership of the common shares of First Gen,” the company said.
First Gen is the power-generation unit of the Lopez firm and the one that bought the said shares. The move was part of its two-year, buy-back program that covers P5 billion worth of series F and G preferred shares. FPH said its net income fell by 11 percent during the first six months of the year, ending June to P6.5 billion from P7.3 billion last year due to higher finance costs that went up to P626 million, a 15-percent increase and higher general and administrative expenses.
It had a foreign-exchange loss of P250 million as against last year’s gains of P461 million.
The company had a measly 1-percent increase in revenues for the period to P48.4 billion from last year’s P47.9 billion.
Sale of electricity went up by 3 percent due to the increase in the volume and average selling price of electricity sold by Energy Development Corp. on the back of incremental revenues from Bac-Man, Nasulo and Burgos Wind power-generating units commissioned in the latter part of 2014.
Sale of merchandise, meanwhile, was up by 13 percent attributed to higher sales volume of distribution transformers of First Philippine Electric Corp.’s electrical utilities sector.
These increases were offset largely by the decrease in revenues from the real-estate sector due to lower condominium sales of Rockwell Land Corp. and industrial land sales of First Philippine Industrial Park for the period.
The company managed to book P2.5 billion in real-estate sales, a 23-percent decline from last year’s P3.26 billion.