Solar Philippines Power Project Holdings, Inc. assured stakeholders that the Stock Rights Offering of its unit SP New Energy Corporation will be fully complete by March.
In a disclosure to the Philippine Stock Exchange on Thursday, SPNEC said completing its SRO is crucial for the planned share swap with its parent firm.
Citing indications of interest for its shares, SPNEC said Solar Philippines offered to purchase its remaining shares by March at the SRO price of P1.50 per share to guarantee that all partially paid and unpaid shares purchases will be settled.
To recall, SPNEC conducted an SRO for 1.87 billion shares in September last year. Of these, 1.27 billion were fully paid and 748 million were partially paid with 25 percent down payments.
The due date on the balance of the partially paid shares was initially set on 5 December 2022 and was moved to 5 March 2023.
As of December 2022, the company had 578 million remaining partially paid SRO shares.
The completion of the payments for this number of shares by March 2023 may result in an additional P651 million in proceeds to fund SPNEC’s ongoing project developments.
“We are grateful to our public shareholders for believing in the value of our company’s shares. With the improved market conditions this year, we hope this will bring forth a positive feedback loop, by enabling the completion of our SRO, and in turn enabling our share swap, private placements, and project developments,” Solar Philippines founder Leandro Leviste said.
As of 8 February, SPNEC’s closing price stood at P1.54 per share or 2.67 percent above its SRO price.
As part of its share swap, SPNEC would issue 24.372 billion additional shares in exchange for projects of SP, in addition to its existing 10 billion shares.
It will result in SPNEC having 34.37 billion shares outstanding, which would require the public to own a total of at least 6.87 billion shares to achieve at least 20 percent public float.
Assuming 4.75 billion shares held by the public after recent private placements, SPNEC would need to increase its public float by at least another 2.12 billion shares.
The company has disclosed that it is working on further private placements to accelerate its project developments and broaden SPNEC’s shareholder base in preparation for its share swap.