San Miguel unit completes tender offer of Eagle Cement

A unit of San Miguel Corp. (SMC) now holds nearly all common shares in Eagle Cement Corp. after it completed the tender offer for the remaining 11.46% total issued and outstanding shares of the cement manufacturer.

The SMC unit, San Miguel Equity Investment, Inc. (SMEII), now owns a total of 4.998 billion or 99.96% common shares of the acquired company.

In a disclosure, Eagle Cement said that the accepted tender offer shares were crossed through the Philippine Stock Exchange (PSE) on Wednesday after getting the approval for a special block sale of the tendered shares.

On Monday, Eagle Cement was advised by the PSE that it had received a block sale application for the tendered shares to be executed on Dec. 14 and that it would implement a trading suspension on the company’s shares after the execution of the block sale.

The tendered shares — 572.78 million common shares — were purchased by SMEII at the tender offer price for a total consideration of P12.62 billion. They were all settled on Wednesday.

The tender offer price is at P22.02 per common share, which was higher than the volume-weighted average price of Eagle Cement a year ago. The total shares amount to about P97.44 billion.

In previous disclosures, both companies shared that Eagle Cement will voluntarily delist from the PSE after the completion of the tender offer.

Once done, the acquisition will consolidate the two companies led by Ramon S. Ang and will increase SMEII’s total cement production capacity by 8.6 million metric tons per annum.

The transaction started on Oct. 5 when the majority shareholders of Eagle Cement signed a share purchase agreement with SMEII for the sale of 4.425 billion shares.

On the stock exchange on Wednesday, shares in SMC slipped by 0.75 or 0.79% to P94 apiece, while shares in Eagle Cement closed unchanged at P17 each. — Justine Irish D. Tabile