‘SPNEC to complete SRO in March’

BY VG CABUAG – FEBRUARY 10, 2023
from Business Mirror

SP New Energy Corp. (SPNEC) on Thursday said it is committed to complete its stock rights offering (SRO) at the Philippine Stock Exchange by next month to enable its share swap with parent firm Solar Philippines Power Project Holdings Inc.

SPNEC said based on indications of interest for its shares, it expects that the partially paid SRO shares will be fully paid. If any of these are not yet fully paid when due, as assurance for the completion of the SRO, Solar Philippines has offered to purchase any remaining shares as of March from SPNEC at the SRO price of P1.50 apiece.

The company’s SRO consists of the issuance of 1.87 billion shares priced at P1.50 per share, for a total offer size of P2.81 billion. The shares were offered to eligible shareholders as of the record date of August 25.

“We are grateful to our public shareholders for believing in the value of our company’s shares. With the improved market conditions this year, we hope this will bring forth a positive feedback loop, by enabling the completion of our SRO, and in turn enabling our share swap, private placements and project developments,” Solar Philippines founder Leandro Leviste.

SPNEC’s closing price as of February 8 was P1.54 per share, above its SRO price. It was trading at P1.59 per share on Thursday .

In September, SPNEC conducted its SRO for 1.87 billion shares, of which 1.12 billion were fully paid and 748,02 million, with 25 percent downpayments. The due date on the balance of the partially paid shares was initially set on December 5 and was moved to March 5.

As of December 22, the company had 578.76 million remaining partially paid SRO shares. The completion of the payments for this number of shares by next month may result in an additional P651 million in proceeds to fund SPNEC’s ongoing project developments.

As part of its share swap, SPNEC would issue 24.372 billion additional shares in exchange for projects of Solar Philippines in addition to its existing 10 billion shares. This will result in SPNEC having 34.37 billion shares outstanding, which would require the public to own a total of at least 6.87 billion shares to achieve an at least 20 percent public float.

Assuming 4.75 billion shares are held by the public after recent private placements, SPNEC would need to increase its public float by at least another 2.12 billion shares.

The company has disclosed that it is working on further private placements to accelerate its project developments and broaden SPNEC’s shareholder base in preparation for its share swap.