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Aqua awaits approval to buy back public shares
Bottled water company Aqua Golden Mississippi announced in a statement that it had raised its tender offer to buy back its public shares at Rp 500,000 (US$55
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ottled water company Aqua Golden Mississippi announced in a statement that it had raised its tender offer to buy back its public shares at Rp 500,000 (US$55.50) per share to delist the company from the Indonesia Stock Exchange (IDX) and change it’s status from public to private company.
The price is more than the previous offer of Rp 450,000 per share, and 67 times more than the company’s initial 1990 public offering at Rp 7,500 per share. Aqua’s (AQUA) share price is currently Rp 244,800 per share.
A minority of 5.7 percent, or 743,383, of Aqua’s shares are publicly owned. The majority shareholders of Aqua is PT Tirta Investama, who owns 94.3 percent of the company, or 12,419,090 shares. Tirta Investama itself is 74 percent owned by French Danone Groupe SA.
As part of the plan to buy back publicly owned shares at Rp 500,000 per share, the company will have to spend Rp 371.7 billion to realize the delisting and go private.
But the fate of whether or not the company will go private relies heavily on the extraordinary shareholders meeting, said Anis Baridwan, Capital Market and Financial Institutions Supervisory Agency head of division of financial report inspection for real sector companies.
“We hope to get the green light from the minority shareholders at the meeting,” Aqua president director Parmaningsih told The Jakarta Post via text message on Sunday.
Aqua said in a statement sent to the IDX that it would hold an extraordinary shareholders meeting on Sept. 22.
“The shareholders meeting will discuss the plan to delist the company and change its status from public to private company.
“The company will also ask shareholders permission to give the company the authority to take whatever action is needed in order to succeed the ‘go private’ plan,” Aqua said in the statement.
Aqua first unveiled its plan to voluntarily delist itself from the IDX in 2001 due to minimum trading activity on the stock exchange. But minority shareholders refused to back the plan as the company only offered to buy back the shares at Rp 35,000 per share, equal to the share price traded in the period.
Trading of Aqua shares has been suspended since November 2009, with share prices currently frozen at Rp 244,800 per share. (est)
