MANILA, Philippines — Citicore Energy REIT Corp. (CREIT) has moved its planned market debut to Feb. 18, instead of today, Feb. 17 as it needed more time to process the orders amid strong demand from investors.
This is similar to what happened to the planned listings of DoubleDragon’s DDMP REIT and MREIT Inc.
Because of very strong demand from retail investors, CREIT needed more time to reconcile and process orders from roughly 20,000 individual accounts, sources said.
The company completed its offer period last Feb 8 with oversubscriptions across all tranches – institutional, trading participants, and local small investors (LSI). Specifically, the LSI tranche generated an oversubscription level of 124.09 percent, receiving a total demand of 270.7 million shares from the 218.2 million shares allocated.
“We are grateful to the overwhelming reception of investors, owing also to the extensive market education conducted, which further increased appreciation for REITs as a new asset class. The projected dividend yield based on projected 2022 and 2023 earnings of seven percent and 7.4 percent, respectively, (based on the Final REIT Plan) – the highest among the existing REITs – also energized investors to invest in CREIT, being the first REIT also to be listed in the Year of the Tiger,” said Oliver Tan, president and CEO of CREIT.
Post-offer, the company plans to implement a dividend payout of at least 95 percent of its distributable income for the preceding year. This is subject to availability of unrestricted retained earnings and compliance with applicable laws, which is a premium over the required dividend payout of at least 90 percent based on the REIT IRR.
“In as much as the underwriters wanted to accommodate all interested investors, the strong orders for CREIT’s IPO from local and international institutions and more than 5,000 retail investors simply outnumbered the total shares offered to the public. The underwriters nonetheless exerted efforts to distribute the shares as widely as possible to a broad investor base to hopefully result to better liquidity and more active trading,” said Pamela Louise Victoriano, Unicapital Inc.’s first vice president for Corporate Finance.
CREIT’s offering comprised 2.5 billion common shares at a P2.55 per share to raise P6.4 billion.
Citicore is the first solar company in the country to do a REIT offering after several property companies listed their REITs in the past two years.
CREIT will use net proceeds from its initial public offering to acquire properties within the Citicore Group, including properties owned by Citicore Solar Bulacan Inc. and Citicore South Cotabato, which operate solar plants.