Villar planning to IPO three new companies by Q2 2023
The country’s richest person, Manny Villar, said that he is planning to list three new companies on the PSE within the next 12 months.
In addition to VistaREIT [VREIT pre-SEC], the family’s first REIT and the country’s first mall-based REIT, Villar plans to list his coffee chain, Coffee Project, and a small regional power plant operator, SIPCor, that owns two operating plants in Visayas with a combined capacity of 15 megawatts.
While we know that Villar will be aiming to raise around P9.2 billion for VREIT, he wasn’t forthcoming about the size and scope of the Coffee Project and SIPCor IPOs, except to say that he “would not be listing if I will raise only P1 billion” in response to rumors that he might look to raise P1 billion with the Coffee Project IPO.
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While it’s true that recent IPOs under the Villar name have, objectively, been terrible (AllHome [HOME 8.00 4.76%] is down 30%, AllDay Marts [ALLDY 0.45 3.45%] is down 25%, and Medilines Distributors [MEDIC 0.79 2.47%] is down 66%), it’s also true that none of these businesses are bad.
They all turn a profit.
They all exist in growth industries.
They all are run competently, with focus.
In each case, Manny (and in the case of MEDIC, his brother, Virgilio) did a great job of packaging up the business and selling it to bankers and institutional investors.
The group has been less successful at offloading shares into the retail market, as in every case, the take-up on the PSE EASy tranche (the one that we small-time investors have the best chance at buying from) has trailed that of the broker and institutional tranches.
The worst that can be said about these stocks is that they’re too expensive.
Yet, from Manny’s and Virgilio’s perspectives, their equity-raising goals were met.
Whether the stocks shot up or tanked, the Villar family still filled the bank.
Will the group still look to pursue this expensive pricing strategy with these three new IPOs, or will they try to win back investors’ confidence considering the chance that this may be the first stage of a relatively long “golden era” for Villar-related businesses?
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Merkado Barkada's opinions are provided for informational purposes only, and should not be considered a recommendation to buy or sell any particular stock. These daily articles are not updated with new information, so each investor must do his or her own due diligence before trading, as the facts and figures in each particular article may have changed.
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