Quick Take: Metro Pacific's tender offer price and 2 more market updates
DFNN [DFNN 2.92 1.0%; 615% avgVol] [link] said that it would comply with its PSE disclosure and reporting requirements by submitting its audited financial statements for FY22 “by next week”. DFNN’s stock was suspended by the PSE for failing to submit its FY22 annual statement by the deadline.
MB Quick Take: DFNN said a bunch of buzz-words like “forefront”, “cutting-edge”, “Avant-garde”, “e-banking”, “internet of things”, “A.I.”, “cryptocurrency”, “blockchain”, “digital assets”, and “data science” (all in one sentence, I’m not joking) to explain that its business “outpaced financial and accounting standards”, and that’s why it’s going to have to hand in its homework next week. I like the niche that DFNN works in as a company, but I absolutely hate this patronizing and arrogant approach, because it squandered a genuine opportunity to explain what is actually happening in a way that could have increased certainty and understanding. Instead, we got that word salad. At least it’s hilarious.
AbaCore Capital [ABA 6.20; 13% avgVol] [link] reported a Q1 net income attributable that was up 2,537% y/y to P308 million, but down 85% q/q from Q4/22’s net income attributable of P1,996 million. ABA attributed the outperformance to a P250 million gain on the sale of investment property, a P76 million gain on the sale of a subsidiary, and a P4.8 million share of the net earnings of Pacific Online Systems Corporation [LOTO 2.95; 25% avgVol]. The skewed q/q downtrend is the result of the high bar effect coming from ABA’s P1.9 billion in fair value gains that it booked in Q4/22 on the revaluation of its properties.
MB Quick Take: ABA’s been on a mission for more than a year to monetize the company’s vast land and business holdings. It’s not like a regular business with dependable core earnings, it’s mostly in a mad scramble to realize a higher percentage of its book value for the ownership group and stakeholders. It makes money by selling parts of itself, and this quarter, it happened to sell some parts of itself, and that looks amazing compared to a previous quarter where it really didn’t do that at all.
Metro Pacific [MPI 4.47 1.4%; 67% avgVol] [link] revealed that it might be open to revising the tender offer price for MPI shares after strong pushback from funds and minority shareholders. First Pacific, the controlling shareholder in MPI, said that the tender offer price was based off of a “preliminary” report by a valuation provider, and added that the final report “has not been released yet.” First Pacific also said that the tender offer price didn’t take MPI’s great Q1 performance. The company said that the final valuation report would be released after MPI’s June 6 stockholder’s meeting.
MB Quick Take: Perhaps this is all just some framing device to gain consensus approval for a marginally-higher price by making the fund managers feel like big boy winners for “forcing” MPI to eat its original offer and come back to the table with something “good enough” for shareholders. Maybe it’s a similar mental manipulation as when an IPO offer will (predictably) drop its offer price to give the impression of a special friend discount, when that “discount’ price was intended to be the real price the whole way along. I don’t really know for certain, but we’ll only have to wait 2.5 weeks to find out the new price and make our own assessments on whether that was the real price the whole time (or not).
--
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
