NCBFG extends APO closure date

Source: Trinidad Guardian

Ja­maica's NCB Fi­nan­cial Group (NCBFG) an­nounced on Fri­day that it will be ex­tend­ing its Ad­di­tion­al Pub­lic Of­fer­ing (APO) of shares in the group by one week.

The an­nounce­ment came in a no­tice on the web­sites of the Ja­maica and T&T stock ex­changes, where NCBFG is list­ed.

The APO opened on May 6,and was orig­i­nal­ly sched­uled to close to­mor­row. The new dead­line for the clo­sure of the APO is June 3.

"The ex­ten­sion is in re­sponse to re­quests by po­ten­tial in­vestors for ad­di­tion­al time and is in­tend­ed to en­sure the broad­est pos­si­ble par­tic­i­pa­tion of in­vestors," said NCBFG in the no­tice.

The APO in­vit­ed of­fers to ac­quire 78,500,000 new or­di­nary shares in NCBFG, with the abil­i­ty to up­size the of­fer to a max­i­mum of 117,750,000 shares.

The price of the of­fer­ing is J$65 per share, which means the APO would gross J$5.09 bil­lion (US$32.6 mil­lion) if it were ful­ly sub­scribed. If the APO is up­sized, it could gross J$7.65 bil­lion (US$49 mil­lion).

Al­though NCBFG is cross-list­ed on the T&T Stock Ex­change, the APO was not mar­ket­ed to the T&T mar­ket.

In a mes­sage to prospec­tive in­vestors in the prospec­tus of the APO, NCBFG chair­man Michael Lee-Chin said one of the rea­sons for the of­fer­ing is to re­duce the lev­els of debt at the fi­nan­cial hold­ing com­pa­ny.

"We in­tend to use the net pro­ceeds from this in­vi­ta­tion to sup­port a part of our de­lib­er­ate cap­i­tal re­cal­i­bra­tion with a fo­cus on delever­ag­ing and bol­ster­ing cap­i­tal bases," Lee-Chin wrote.

The Ja­maica Ob­serv­er re­port­ed on April 28: "NCBFG, the stand-alone hold­ing com­pa­ny, cur­rent­ly has $36.84 bil­lion (US$23.61 mil­lion) in debt due be­tween Oc­to­ber 1, 2023, and Sep­tem­ber 30, 2024, rel­a­tive to its to­tal debt load of $93.51 bil­lion (US$59.94 bil­lion)."

In its May 9 re­port of its unau­dit­ed fi­nan­cials, NCBFG record­ed J$8.65 bil­lion in net prof­it at­trib­ut­able to share­hold­ers of the com­pa­ny for the six months end­ed March 31, 2024. That is an im­prove­ment of 88.8 per cent com­pared to the six months end­ing March 31, 2023.