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Keppel Philippines Holdings [KPH 26.15, up 3.4%; 6% avgVol] [link] updated the exchange to say that at least two-thirds of its shareholders approved KPH’s plan to voluntarily delist, with no votes against. KPH’s parent company, Kepwealth Inc., will conduct a tender offer at P27.40/share, starting on April 28 and running through May 27. The settlement of the tender offer would be on June 10. KPH has asked for its voluntary delisting from the exchange to occur on June 24.
MB bottom-line: I often make fun of the PSE whenever a company delists, but the truth is that I’d rather see a company delist like KPH is doing here than to see that company go through the clumsy process of stripping itself down into a non-operational shell in order to prepare itself to be sold to some random backdoor listing candidate at some unspecified time in the future. If I had to speculate, I’d say the PSE’s reluctance to enforce the rules as they’re written against non-compliant corporations, and the market’s distasteful reaction to natural delistings like this one, are symptoms of the PSE’s actual sickness, which is regulatory mismanagement. When there are only a handful of IPOs each year, the prospect of involuntarily delisting one, two, or ten non-compliant companies might seem like a massive step in the wrong direction. It’s not. But for bureaucrats who might have their egos and legacies tied up with these metrics, it might seem better to allow (or even encourage) unfit and past-their-time corporations to remain on the board, even if it’s just in a suspended state. Delistings are a natural part of exchange life, and they help keep our garden of investment options healthy.
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