Buyout price for Indofood Agri raised to 32.75 S cents per share

INDOFOOD Sukses Makmur has raised its buyout offer price for Indofood Agri Resources (IndoAgri) to 32.75 Singapore cents per share from 27.75 Singapore cents previously, the mainboard-listed company announced in a bourse filing on Sunday.

Earlier on Friday, CIMB had also announced the revision in an SGX filing on behalf of the offeror.

The revised offer price represents a 26 per cent premium to IndoAgri's last traded share price of 26 Singapore cents on Apr 5, and a 42.1 per cent premium to its volume-weighted average price (VWAP) of 23.04 cents for the month up to the last trading day.

However, the new offer price still represents a steep 59 per cent discount to IndoAgri's unaudited net asset value per share of 79.8 Singapore cents, slightly down from the 65.2 per cent discount with the previous offer price.

The offeror does not intend to revise the final offer price.

The Indonesian conglomerate - popularly known as the maker of Indomie - and its concert parties owned 82.35 per cent of IndoAgri as at Friday, still shy of the 90 per cent threshold for the offer to turn unconditional.

The buyout offer for IndoAgri has received valid acceptances from shareholders, excluding concert parties, representing 7.82 per cent of IndoAgri's total shares as at Friday.

Given the offer price revision, IndoAgri will send a supplemental letter to shareholders with the advice of independent financial adviser, Novus Corporate Finance.

In its previous letter, Novus advised that the initial offer price of 28 cents per share, which was later adjusted to 27.75 cents in view of the FY2018 dividend, was "not fair but reasonable" and recommended that shareholders accept the offer.

Reasons that Novus had deemed the original offer "not fair" were that the offer price was at a "significant discount" to IndoAgri's NAV per share, and that the premia of the offer price over the one-month, three-month and six-month VWAP was lower than the mean and median premia of those in previous privatisations.

Shares of IndoAgri closed flat at 27.5 Singapore cents on Friday.