HAGL chairman to sell off 23 million shares

Conglomerate Hoàng Anh Gia Lai’s chairman Đoàn Nguyên Đức will sell 23 million HAGL shares as guaranteed assets to help the company restructure its debts.- Photo cafef.vn

The shares will be transferred between Friday and November 25 via put-through transactions, reducing Đức’s ownership in HAGL to 324.77 million shares, or 35.02 per cent of the capital.

The chairman is currently using his 145 million shares as guaranteed assets for corporate bonds that have been issued to Viet Capital Bank, Bắc Á Bank, HDBank, VPBank and Bank for Investment and Development of Việt Nam (BIDV).

According to HAGL, the agriculture conglomerate has completed negotiations with lenders to allow the company to pay its debts and interest based on the sales of rubber and palm oil products from 2019 onwards.

At present, HAGL is offloading its assets in the business units that are not prioritised, such as the shopping centre-hotel-apartment-office complex in Myanmar’s capital Yangon, collecting debt payments and completing the conversion of corporate bonds into shares for Singapore national wealth fund Temasek Holdings.

HAGL, in early June, issued 137.5 million shares at VNĐ8,000 per share to Temasek to convert corporate bonds worth VNĐ1.13 trillion (some US$49 million). The bonds were issued to the Singaporean fund company in 2010 to fund the Vietnamese firm in developing rubber farms, building hydropower plants, buying copper ore processing machines and providing additional capital.

These actions aimed to narrow the company’s total debt balance and direct financial sources to focus on large-scale exploitation of fruit farms to generate high profits in the near future.

On June 26, Northbooks Investment Mauritius Pte Ltd, holder of exchangeable bonds with total Par value of VNĐ697 billion (equivalent to 697,000 bonds of HAGL), agreed to transfer all the exchangeable bonds to Glory Red Star Co Ltd, HAGL said in its second-quarter financial statement.

The bonds then were handed over to three other individual investors. Northbooks Investment Mauritius had previously offloaded VND433 billion worth of bonds to SSI Asset Management Co.

After the two transfers, Northbooks Investment Mautirius Pte Ltd and Temasek were no longer involved in HAGL’s bond and share trading.

In the first nine months of 2017, HAGL has cut its total debt to VNĐ23.1 trillion from VNĐ27.3 trillion. The conglomerate targets to reduce its total debt to below VNĐ22.3 trillion by the end of 2017.

In the first three quarters, HAGL estimates to post nearly VNĐ4 trillion in combined revenue and nearly VNĐ1.2 trillion in pre-tax profit, which included a third-quarter pre-tax profit of VNĐ166 billion.

In the final quarter of the year, the conglomerate targets combined revenue of VNĐ1.77 trillion and pre-tax profit of VNĐ180 billion.

HAGL is listed on the HCM Stock Exchange under code HAG. The company’s shares fell 1.9 per cent on Friday to VNĐ7,550 (33.5 US cents) per share.