Bourse OKs GT Capital’s P12-B shares offering

The Philippine Stock Exchange has approved an offering by Ty family-led conglomerate GT Capital Holdings Inc. of as much as P12 billion worth of perpetual preferred shares.

Based on an offering memorandum issued by the PSE Friday, the offering would run from Oct. 17 to 21 while the listing date was tentatively set for Oct. 27.

The conglomerate plans to offer at least 8 million perpetual preferred shares at an issue price of P1,000 per share.  This will allow GT Capital to raise at least P8 billion from this offering. The offer size can be increased by 4 million preferred shares in case of oversubscription, bringing the maximum issuance to P12 billion.

A perpetual preferred stock has no maturity date and will continue paying dividends indefinitely until the issuer, GT Capital, exercises its option to redeem the shares.

The perpetual preferred shares will have two series. For series A, GT Capital has the option to redeem in whole but not a part of the shares on the fifth anniversary of the issue date or any dividend payment date thereafter. For series B, GT Capital has option to redeem them starting the seventh year.

The synthetic maturity will thus be five and seven years, which will be the basis of the dividend pricing to be done on Oct. 13.

GT Capital expects to use proceeds from the offer to refinance by the fourth quarter of this year previous acquisitions that were paid through bridge financing.  Part of the proceeds will be used for other strategic acquisitions.

In October last year, the conglomerate availed itself of a P9-billion loan from Philippine National Bank, Security Bank, Bank of the Philippine Islands and the Development Bank of the Philippines.