Tanduay, union sign 3-year CBA

Rum-maker Tanduay Distillers Inc. signed a three-year collective bargaining agreement with the employees of its liquor manufacturing plant in Cabuyao, Laguna.

The CBA was finalized ahead of the P1.68-billion follow-on offering of TDI’s publicly listed parent company, Tanduay Holdings, which is under the Lucio Tan group of companies.

The workers were represented by labor union Nagkakaisang Lakas Manggagawa ng Tanduay Distillers Inc.-FSM, which accepted the CBA covering the period August 2011 to August 2014, Tanduay said in a statement.

“We did it in three months,” said Tanduay Holdings managing director Wilson Young, adding that the employees looked happy.

Asked about the highlig hts of the CBA, Young said this was an extension of the provisions of the previous CBA. Under the package, the distillery’s workers will get an average increase in monthly compensation of about P3,000 for the first year of the CBA. There will be an increase of 10 percent in the monthly benefits in the last two years of the agreement.

The Laguna plant is Tanduay’s largest production plant with a bottling capacity of about 75,000 cases per day, liquor aging capacity of 49,000 barrels and alcohol storage capacity of 3 million liters. The plant is currently upgrading its facilities by adding a new bottling line, installing new compounding facilities and fabricating additional storage tanks at a total project cost of P265 million.

The plant sits on a 7.5 -hectare property inside the Asia Brewery Complex. The plant started operations in 1991.

Young said the CBA covered 50 employees covered by this CBA.

Tanduay Holdings last week priced its equity offering at P4.22 per share, marking a discount of about 17 percent to Tanduay’s last traded price of P5.10 per share as a sweetener to prospective new investors.

The liquor company is offering 398.14 million shares this week under a place-out scheme that will widen its public float by around 11 percent.

Under the scheme, Tanduay’s majority shareholder Tangent Holdings—in turn controlled by the group of tycoon Lucio Tan—will sell secondary shares to the public. Tangent will use the proceeds to buy exactly the same amount of new shares from Tanduay at exactly the same price as the prior subscription, less the expenses.

This top-up offering is similar to the scheme taken by many other publicly listed companies wishing to take a faster route in widening public ownership, avoiding the tedious registration process if new shares were to be offered directly to the public.