Cash offer for Chip Eng Seng raised to S$0.75 per share

CHIP Eng Seng : C29 0% chairman Celine Tang and her husband Gordon Tang have revised the mandatory conditional cash offer to acquire the property player to S$0.75, a S$0.03 or 4.2 per cent improvement over the initial offer of S$0.72 a share.

The offeror is Tang Dynasty Treasure, an investment holding company owned by the couple. They had made the initial offer to acquire all issued ordinary shares of Chip Eng Seng on Nov 24 at S$0.72 apiece, with the end goal of privatising and delisting the property player from the Singapore Exchange (SGX) should they attain more than 90 per cent of the shares.

According to the offer announcement issued by UOB on the offeror’s behalf on Friday (Dec 2) evening, this is their final offer, “save that the offeror reserves the right to do so in a competitive situation”. The terms of the offer remain unchanged.

The offeror*(see amendment note below) said the final offer exceeds the shares’ highest closing price in the three-year period prior to and including the holding announcement date on Sep 7.

This consideration also represents a premium of about 42.6 per cent over the volume weighted average price (VWAP) for the company’s shares for the 12-month period prior to and including Sep 7.

The premiums of the consideration over the VWAP for the one-month, three-month and six-month period stands at 13.1 per cent, 26.5 per cent and 33.7 per cent respectively, the company said.

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The offeror* said the final offer consideration “reinforces the attractive exit opportunity for shareholders”. Currently, the offer remains the only offer available for acceptance by shareholders to realise their investment in the company, it added.

As at 6 pm on Dec 2, the total number of shares owned, controlled or agreed to be acquired by the offeror and its concert parties amount to an aggregate of 370.7 million shares, representing approximately 47.27 per cent of the total number of issued shares.

The couple recently privatised Singhaiyi Group at a significant discount to its net asset value. Singhaiyi was delisted from SGX on Jan 31.

Shares of Chip Eng Seng closed flat at S$0.74 on Friday prior to the announcement.

* Amendment note: A previous version of this article wrongly cited Chip Eng Seng, when it was the offeror.