The Employees Provident Fund (EPF), which holds a 9.5% stake in MISC Bhd, has accepted Petroliam Nasional Bhd's (Petronas) revised offer price of RM5.50 per share to take the company private.
EPF's acceptance of the revised offer price brought the acceptance level to 17.1% as of yesterday. With this stake, Petronas' total shareholding was now 79.77%. The offer needs to reach the 90% acceptance level for it to become unconditional, thereby paving the way for the stock's delisting.
In a filing with Bursa Malaysia, MISC said the shares for which acceptances had been received but not verified stood at 0.01% as at 5pm yesterday.
EPF's acceptance confirms an earlier StarBiz report that EPF could “cave in” and accept the revised offer price of RM5.50 per share. By accepting the offer, EPF stands to pocket some RM2.33bil in gains.
Petronas had, on April 5, revised the offer price to RM5.50 from RM5.30. It would have to fork out RM9.2bil, about RM400mil more, to take its shipping arm private.
MISC's third-biggest minority group is Permodalan Nasional Bhd, which has a 6.35% equity interest through its various unit trusts.
MISC's other minority shareholders include Penang Development Corp and Pacific Mutual Fund Bhd, which hold a 1.3% and 0.09% interest, respectively.
On April 8, independent adviser AmInvestment Bank Bhd had advised shareholders to accept the revised offer, saying that it was “not fair” but “reasonable”.
It said that the offer was “not fair” as the revised offer price translated to a discount of between 3.3% and 9.8% to the range of the indicative sum-of-parts valuation (SOPV) of RM5.69 to RM6.10 per MISC share.
However, it added that the revised offer was “reasonable” all the same after taking into consideration the risks and challenges the shipping industry faced.
Meanwhile, research houses Kenanga Research and RHB Research have both recommended minority shareholders to accept the offer.
Kenanga Research said it maintained its recommendation for minority shareholders to accept the offer, given that the revised offer price was a better offer, and at a 19% premium above its SOPV of RM4.61.
It also believes that the shipping industry would continue to be negatively impacted by lower charter rates and higher bunker costs.
RHB Research, which had earlier recommended for minority shareholders to reject Petronas' initial offer, said that it would be difficult for the minority shareholders to ask for a higher offer price due to the uneven distribution of share ownership in MISC.
Moving forward, RHB said it foresaw a restructuring within the MISC group after it was taken private, which might potentially see its business entities eventually being re-listed separately. The remaining minority shareholders have until April 19 to either accept or reject the offer.
Yesterday, the counter closed one sen down to RM5.41, with 25.53 million shares being done.