Quick Take: SPC Power's "good fortune" and 3 more market updates

Figaro [FCG 0.9 13.6%] [link] had a massive day, pushing the stock back up to its early post-IPO high. FCG is up 77% since October 2022, and more impressively, is up over 48% since the start of 2023.

MB Quick Take: Quick service restaurants like Jollibee [JFC 248.0 0.8%] have had a pretty good start to the year, as have most other stocks, but FCG is in a different category entirely. Something is going on, though, because FCG’s daily volume has skyrocketed for the duration of this pump. In December, FCG was trading maybe an average of 2 million shares a day, but since the start of January, that daily volume average has been closer to 30 million per day. That’s significant, but I have no idea what’s driving that interest.
 

SPC Power [SPC 9.4 2.2%] [link] confirmed reporting that its largest public shareholder, Korean state-owned energy firm KEPCO, is planning to sell the entirety of its 37.96% stake in SPC as part of KEPCO’s “commitment” to a complete phase-out of coal by 2050. According to reporting by the Manila Standard, KEPCO said that it was in the “second round” of the “sales process” for dumping its SPC stake and its 60% ownership stake in KEPCO SPC Power Corp. (KSPC), which is a project company that operates a 200 MW coal-fired power plant in Cebu. KEPCO said that it expects bidders to submit final offers by the end of Q1.

MB Quick Take: It was interesting that SPC confirmed only that KEPCO was indeed going through a sales process for its SPC shares and KSPC shares, but did not directly confirm the reporting that SPC itself was interested in purchasing KEPCO’s stake. SPC would only say that it’s “evaluating and weighing its options”. Like the recent MPI saga with GTCAP as a potential stake-buyer, it’s to KEPCO’s benefit to bring as many potential buyers to the table as possible, to help boost the price, even if its intent from the start has been to sell to SPC.
 

ACEN [ACEN 7.10 3.0%] [link] is “pleased” with the provincial government’s support for its large-scale pumped storage project in New South Wales, Australia. The support is in the form of AU$ 7 million in funding to help finance a feasibility study for the project that, if found to be viable, would start construction in 2025 and be operational by 2030.

MB Quick Take: Pumped storage is one of the answers that we’ve come up with to the “problem” of variable electricity generation from renewable energy sources like solar and wind. It’s not always sunny, and it’s not always windy, and the overall value of renewable energy as an electricity source is lessened by this lack of consistency. When it’s super-windy but demand for electricity is low, the price of spot electricity tanks as the surplus of wind electricity floods the market. So the goal here is to store the electricity in a battery when it’s too cheap to sell, and then sell the electricity to the grid at a favorable price at some later time. While hydro electric dams are the best “batteries” in the world, what do you do in an area with no viable river to produce hydro electricity? Pumped storage, of course! Literally, the pumped storage system uses that excess/cheap electricity to pump water up a hill or into an elevated storage tank of some kind, and then, when electricity rates are higher, it releases that water to run down over a turbine to generate the electricity for sale to the grid. These systems are pathetically inefficient, as they “recover” only around 80% of the energy it takes to get the water up the hill. But, it’s the best option available in a lot of circumstances, and it allows renewables to play a larger and more valuable role in the grid supply energy mix.
 

Phinma Corp [PHN 19.0] [link] advanced P276 million to an affiliate, PHINMA Property Holdings Corp (PPHC), to fund future real estate development. The money for the advance was sourced from PHN’s recent bond issuance. PHN owns 35% of PPHC, which develops vertical and horizontal housing for the “affordable” market segment in Metro Manila, Davao City, Cebu City, and Batangas.

MB Quick Take: An advance is really just a loan, in this case from PHN to PPHC, and it’s one of the ways that a parent company (or significant shareholder) can get money down into subsidiaries and affiliates. Another way would be to purchase shares of the subsidiary or affiliate; the parent gets shares, and the subsidiary/affiliate gets the cash. If the subsidiary is wholly-owned already, there’s no real change with anything: the parent just owns a bigger number of shares that represent the original balance sheet plus the new money. But if the company is not wholly-owned, like if there are other investors (as there are here), this will usually dilute those other investors. Sometimes you will see an advance get converted into shares at some later date, so maybe there’ll be a future where instead of paying PHN back, PPHC will just issue a batch of shares to PHN for payment. But that’s something between the shareholders of PPHC.

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