The initial public offering (IPO) of Maynilad Water Services Inc. could perk up the country’s equities market, as interest rates are declining and investors are naturally gravitating towards the stock market.
Virgilio O. Chua, Security Bank Capital Investment Corp. president, said they are bullish on Maynilad’s IPO, which is the country’s second largest maiden offering at P34 billion.
‘We’re hoping that the Maynilad IPO does well post-listing and that will actually encourage issuers to come out again and investors to invest, to buy shares. So, we’re bullish about that IPO because it’s been quite a significant IPO,’ Chua told reporters in a media briefing for SB Capital’s 30th anniversary.
Maria Margarita Antoinette C. Lee, SB Capital’s coverage and origination team head, said Maynilad’s IPO is oversubscribed and that the IPO will push through notwithstanding the flood control mess.
‘So, we see that there’s still a lot of interest, especially from foreign investors. We have good quality cornerstone investors coming in, such as IFC [International Finance Corp.] and ADB [Asian Development Bank], and we believe that money that will be performing well, also in the secondary market,’ she said.
Maynilad’s IPO alone, only the second maiden offering this year following Top Line Business Development Corp., also has pushed the funding raised at the Philippine Stock Exchange by more than three times from just P11.9 billion last year.
While Chua may be upbeat about the equities market for next year, he could not mention familiar names that may go public.
‘Actually it’s hard to say because some of them we’re still working on. I know that GCash has deferred theirs. SM Prime’s REIT [real estate investment trust] has deferred theirs as well. So, we don’t know. Maybe they will reconsider. But this is just my own (opinion) that with the improvement in the sentiment on the equity capital market, maybe they will be encouraged to actually go out.’
For the fixed-income market, Chua said there were 11 issuers this year, or less than the 12 issuers last year, and most of these were repeat issuers.
‘One of our tasks is to bring new issuers to the market. and we’ve been mandated to actually arrange a maiden retail bond issue. So, we’re very excited about it, because we’re bringing a new name to the debt capital market space.’
Since its founding in 1995, SB Capital has played a key role in shaping the country’s capital markets-arranging over P1 trillion in funding for transformative projects in infrastructure, energy, real estate, mining, manufacturing, health care, and financial services. Through these transactions, the firm has helped drive economic growth, business expansion and industry modernization.