Neither LandBank nor PDSHC budges

LandBank holds firm on its offer to buy PDSHC shares at only P215 apiece. CONTRIBUTED PHOTO

The proposed venue for raising capital for small and medium enterprises (SME) has not moved an inch since the idea first floated as neither the buyer nor the seller can agree to the acquisition price.

This was learned from Land Bank of the Philippines president and CEO Alex Buenaventura who said the Philippine Dealing System Holdings Corp. (PDSHC) insists on asking a better price than the P215 per share LandBank is offering.

He expects to hear from PDSHC by the end of the month.

“We still have to hear from the owners of the stockholders of PDSHC. We issued a new offer letter. We revised our original offer from P360 to P215 per share,” Buenaventura told reporters.

To recall, the state-owned lender recalibrated its offer to purchase PDSH shares for only P215 a piece from following the local bourse’s declaration of dividends of P600 million when LandBank realized the business has significantly lower assets than previously understood.

“When we learned they declared dividends, we revised the offer letter to P215. The offer period has been extended to 31 January 2019,” the LandBank chief said.

Buenaventura expressed confidence the proposed transaction will prosper despite delays.

“No response yet (from PDSHC shareholders). We are very confident because from their reaction when we gave them the original offer, we received a strong response. We got 43 percent of the shareholders who responded positively to our offer,” he said.

According to him, PDSHC wants a better price than P215 which is also the final price LandBank wants to acquire a majority stake in the local bourse.

“They tried negotiating for a better price but we decided to (keep) the offer price,” he said of the firm offer.

“This is our final offer. (If there are no takers), we’ll just work from there. We hope to get the majority so that we can influence the direction of PDS towards supporting [our goal] of raising capital for small and medium enterprises (SME),” he said.

“That’s really the objective of the national government, to nurture capital raising by SME which can only be done if the PDS is kept separate from PSE (Philippine Stocks Exchange),” Buenaventura said.