DIVERSIFIED conglomerate San Miguel Corp. (SMC) may hold the planned share sale next month, company president Ramon S. Ang said on Wednesday.
Ang, who spoke to reporters yesterday while in Bataan, declined to provide additional details on the said equity offer and planned convertible bond sale approved by the company’s board on Tuesday.
SMC shares added 0.82 percent to P171.40 each during yesterday’s trading.
Ang said earlier the company is looking selling up to 1 billion common shares priced between P200 and P250 each, valuing the offer to as much as P250 billion.
The sale, originally scheduled in the first quarter, was postponed due to volatile market conditions. It was earlier reported that issue managers for the share sale are Credit Suisse, Deutsche Bank, Goldman Sachs, Standard Charted Bank and UBS AG.
Proceeds are seen to fund SMC’s ongoing expansion outside its traditional food and drinks business.
Since announcing an aggressive diversification strategy three years ago, SMC has made investments in power, toll roads, railways, airports, telecommunications, oil refining and mining.
SMC’s 2010 profits fell sharply to P20.09 billion, from P57.8 billion the previous year, on the absence of one-time gains such as the 2009 sale of a significant stake in its brewery unit to Japan-based Kirin Holdings.
The company’s recurring net income, however, more than doubled last year buoyed by gains from its power unit.
SMC now has four power plants—the Limay combined-cycle, the Ilijan natural gas-fired, Sual coal-fired, and San Roque hydroelectric power facilities—which generated an estimated 11.1-million megawatt hours last year.
SMC also owns a minority stake in Manila Electric Co., the country’s largest power distributor. It also has interests in infrastructure projects, including Caticlan Airport, the Tarlac-Pangasinan-La Union Expressway, and the MRT-7 Railway.
SMC also owns three coal mines in South Cotabato, Mindanao and a tenth of Australia’s Indophil Resources NL, which owns a third of the $5.9-billion undeveloped Tampakan gold-copper project
SMC is 47.5-percent owned by Top Frontier Investments Holdings Inc., a private company led by the group of former Trade minister Roberto V. Ongpin. The conglomerate also owns a 49-percent stake in Top Frontier.
