The Keepers [KEEPR 1.27 3.25%] [link] suspension was lifted after Lucio Co’s liquor trading company provided substantial disclosure on its acquisition of 50% of the Spanish manufacturer of its most successful product, Alfonso brandy.
MB Quick Take: Looks like Lucio Co will pay for this purchase in one big chunk of cash (~P5 billion) when the deal actually closes, which KEEPR said it expects to happen within the month of September. Investors reacted positively to the news, pushing shares up around 4% in the hours after the suspension was lifted.
Leisure & Resorts World [LR 1.79 6.55%] [link] gets halted briefly after revealing that the LR board approved, in a special meeting on Thursday, the sale of 691,200,000 LR shares by way of private placement, at a price of P1.70/share, Clearspring Holdings Corporation (330,600,000 shares), Belvedere Skies Asset Holding Opc (330,600,000 shares), and Tucket Holdings, Inc. (30,000,000 shares). This would raise P1.17 billion.
MB Quick Take: The sale price was basically pegged right at market, and at a price level that LR hasn’t seen for a full year. It spent a lot of March and April in the P1.20/1.30 range. The board has called a special shareholders meeting to have the long list of changes approved, including that name change to “DigiPlus Interactive Corp”, an authorized capital increase, and this private placement sale. With the board’s last minute name-change tinkering, from “DigiPlus Corporation” to “DigiPlus Interactive Corp”, do you think they did it to justify taking DIC as a ticker symbol? Strong corporate troll game.
Prime Media Holdings [PRIM 1.60 1.23%] [link] was also halted briefly after it disclosed board approval for what the PSE deemed to be a “quasi-reorganziation”. PRIM plans to drop the par value of its Class A Preferred shares from P1.00/share to P0.04/share, which PRIM said will result in additional paid-in capital (known in the biz as “APIC”) of P13,791,609.60, which PRIM plans to apply to its deficit.
MB Quick Take: The real reason for the move is to nuke the foreign investors out, so that PRIM can remain compliant with the requirement that media broadcasters be free of any foreign ownership. While it sounds good to apply the APIC to the deficit, it sounds less impressive when you hear that the deficit is some P861 million, and that this maneuver only reduces it by 1.6%. Once the one-hour halt was lifted, trading in PRIM was relatively light and lacked any conviction in either direction.
Binance [link] said that it is in the process of acquiring a company that has both “both Virtual Asset Service Provider (VASP) and Electronic Money Issuer (EMI) licenses” from the BSP. Binance declined to name the company that it plans to acquire, but there are only 29 EMI license holders, and the BSP has announced a 3-year moratorium on handing out new licenses. Binance said that it was working directly with the BSP on the acquisition, and that the acquisition target was also in contact with the BSP to facilitate the transaction. Binance said that it thinks that there is “high potential in the Philippine market”, and thinks that it could become a worldwide crypto hub in a few years.
MB Quick Take: Binance is scrambling to make it legal for Filipinos to send it money. The truth is that none of our home-grown banks, brokerages, or apps can even get within a 100 miles of the service that Binance can provide. Whether it provides that full service to Filipinos is another matter, but for anyone that has traded crypto on Binance’s main app, you know the depth/breadth of their offering. It makes COL’s entire site look like a captcha.
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