San Miguel Corporation (SMC), one of the Philippines’ largest listed conglomerates, has confirmed the plan of its food and beverage unit to raise up to P142 billion ($2.7 billion) by selling more than one billion existing shares.
In a disclosure to the Philippine Stock Exchange Thursday, SMC said San Miguel Food and Beverage Inc has filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission on August 22 an application for a follow-on offering involving the sale of 887 million common shares owned by SMC, and another 133.05 million to cover over-allotments.
As reflected in the registration statement, the indicative offer price of the San Miguel Food and Beverage shares in the follow-on offering is P140 ($2.6) per share.
The share sale could be the Philippines’ biggest share sale on record, according to a Bloomberg report in April.
“An appropriate disclosure shall be made when the offer price is finally determined and established,” SMC said.
The planned share sale comes after SMC merged three businesses to form the food and drinks unit, which is now worth $12 billion.
Last November, SMC told the PSE that its subsidiary San Miguel Pure Foods Company Incorporated will be called San Miguel Food and Beverage Incorporated as part of the consolidation of its food and beverage businesses.
San Miguel Pure Foods acquired 7.86 billion shares in San Miguel Brewery and 216.97 million shares in San Miguel from SMC. It then issued 4.24 billion shares to parent firm SMC. The consolidation was completed last June 29.
The F&B unit of SMC registered consolidated revenues of P137.4 billion for the first half of 2018, up 15 per cent from the same period last year, as combined net income and operating income went up 20 per cent to P15.4 billion and P22.9 billion, respectively.
