Quick takes from around the market
Fernando Zobel de Ayala [link] suddenly converts medical leave to “full resignation” from all Ayala Group companies. In a series of early-morning disclosures , the constellation of Ayala-owned companies revealed that Fernando Zobel de Ayala (FZA) had officially resigned from all of his roles and directorships to “focus more on his recovery and health.” Each of the companies said that a replacement director would be elected “in due time”. Officially, FZA resigned from the following roles/positions: ACEN [ACEN 7.12 1.14%] (Chairman of the Board, director), Ayala Corp [AC 733.00 2.23%] (Vice-Chairman, President, CEO), BPI [BPI 98.25 2.24%] (director), Ayala Land [ALI 29.15 4.86%] (Chairman of the Board, director), Manila Water Company [MWC 15.40 0.52%] (director), Integrated Micro-Electronics [IMI 6.58] (director), and Globe [GLO 2130.00 1.91%] (Co-Vice Chairman, director).
MB Quick Take: I’m not going to speculate on what’s happening here, as FZA is clearly dealing with a serious and private medical issue, but the objective sequence of events is not positive for FZA or the Ayala Family. He only took medical leave about a month ago, and to go from “leave” to “full resignation” is almost unprecedented at this scale. The market has not been kind to the Ayala Family this year, but right now, that appears to be the least of FZA’s worries.
Lepanto Consolidated Mining Company [LC 0.13 5.30%] [link] amended the terms of its unfiled stock rights offering (SRO) “in consideration of the present market condition”. The board authorized the management team to adjust the SRO price and other terms back on July 18th, but only made the actual changes on September 9th. The price per share was reduced from P0.14 to P0.12. The number of shares to be sold increased from 14,429,512,629 to 16,803,989,391. The entitlement ratio dropped from one SRO share for every 4.6 LC shares to one SRO share for every 3.95 LC shares. The total value of the SRO, whenever it’s filed, remains at around P2 billion.
MB Quick Take: At this pace they’re going to need to do a couple more rounds of revisions to account for whatever wild things happen between now and... 2023? This timeline doesn’t give me a great deal of confidence in the group, but perhaps there’s something happening (or not happening) behind the scenes that I don’t know about. Regardless, all I know is that there’s not a lot happening on center stage right now.
Prime Media Holdings [PRIM 1.68 1.18%] [link] expects to complete all of its amendments to its articles by sometime in December of this year. PRIM is doing the amendments in three batches, with the end result of increasing its authorized capital stock from P5 billion to P7 billion while removing any foreign ownership to remain compliant with the laws against foreign ownership for a mass media company.
MB Quick Take: Feels like PRIM is scrambling to ramp up, and providing this timeline might help keep stakeholders on-board. Aside from GMA [GMA7 10.96 1.48%], the sole survivor of the execution of ABS-CBN [ABS 8.95 1.10%], Manny VIllar’s ALLTV network has been making money moves (content deal with CNN Philippines and potential partnership with Globe [GLO 2130.00 1.91%]), and the Apollo Quiboloy-owned SMNI News will always be something of a dark horse due to Quiboloy’s ties to the administration as a Marcos backer. This is a “Game of Homes”, in terms of who gets to set the editorial direction of information for the foreseeable future.
Philippine Airlines [PAL 5.90 0.84%] [link] notifies users that it lost control of personal information in a “cybersecurity incident” that may have revealed the “name, date of birth, nationality, gender, join date, tier level and points balance”. PAL blamed its “third party IT service provider” for the leak of the information, and looked to reassure users that neither “contact details nor financial information” were included in the data that PAL failed to safeguard.
MB Quick Take: Cybersecurity is hard, but you don’t get to dodge responsibility by outsourcing the security then throwing the 3rd party under the bus when things go wrong. As someone impacted by the breach, I’m not at all comforted that the leak didn’t include every single bit of information that PAL has required me to provide to them. Did PAL check the security profile of the 3rd party provider before transferring our information to that 3rd party? Why would PAL transfer custody of this information in the first place?
Dito Telecommunity [DITO 3.70 3.35%] [link] launches its first “Super Core Data Center” in Batangas City. The facility is a Tier III data center, which means that it has multiple sources of power and cooling in place to limit potential downtime to just 1.6 hours per year. This is the first Tier III data center in the country, and is the first of two planned by DITO.
MB Quick Take: There is a lot of action in the data center space, but it’s hard to get a handle on the potential edge that these facilities could provide. Are they a competitive advantage that justifies in-house specialists and further R&D, or are they largely commoditized to the point where, in a few years’ time, we’ll be seeing a proliferation of “common data center” providers (like what Megawide [MWIDE 4.98 0.81%] hopes to build) and a wave of sale-leaseback type transactions by telecom operators looking to offload the operation and maintenance of these facilities?
--
Merkado Barkada's opinions are provided for informational purposes only, and should not be considered a recommendation to buy or sell any particular stock. These daily articles are not updated with new information, so each investor must do his or her own due diligence before trading, as the facts and figures in each particular article may have changed.
- Latest
