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SATURDAY, OCTOBER 15, 2016 extrastory2000@gmail.com
Shell opts for lower IPO price By Jenniffer B. Austria
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ILIPINAS Shell Petroleum Corp. has set the final price for its planned maiden share offering at P67 per share, the underwriter handling the transaction said Thursday.
AIA Group call. Philam Life chief executive officer Aibee Cantos (second from left) meets with President Duterte during a courtesy visit in Malacañang, where the President shared his thoughts about the local insurance industry. With them are Philam Life chief agency officer Jay Ledesma (center), AIA Group regional CEO Gordon Watson (partly hidden), and AIA Group chief executive and president Mark Tucker (foreground).
2GO disclaims investor; Phoenix sues By Darwin G. Amojelar 2GO Group Inc. said on Friday the Tagud family remains in control of the publicly listed logistics company and belied the investment of the parent firm of Phoenix Petroleum Philippines Inc. into the company. 2GO Group issued the statement after Udenna Corp., the parent of Phoenix Petroleum, sought a court order to enforce the latter’s investment in the logistics company. “The [management] structure is stable, solid and there has been no change in our book. If there are any prospective partners or investors who want to come in, I believe the management would welcome that provided that all investments are compliant with
laws,” 2GO corporate secretary Lawrence Tanlu told reporters in a briefing. “Our records show that there’s no purchase of Phoenix or any other corporations that is very, very interested into buying into 2Go or any of our subsidiaries,” he added. Udenna Corp., the parent of Phoenix Petroleum, earlier said it bought 100 percent of KGL Investments B.V. (KGLI BV), a Dutch company, which owns about 40 percent of the voting stock and 80 percent of KGLINM Holding. KGLI-NM, meanwhile, has about 60 percent of the voting stock and a 40-percent beneficial interest in Negros Navigation Co. Nenaco, in turn, owns about
88 percent of 2Go Group Inc. As a result, Udenna Investments indirectly has 21 percent voting and 28 percent beneficial interests in 2Go. Lorna Kapunan, legal counsel of Nenaco said there was no change in the majority ownership of the 2GO Group and it remains owned by the Tagud family. “In the interest of transparency we are awaiting for the documents. We do not want uncertainty created among partners and alliance,” Kapunan said. Sought for comment, Dennis A. Uy, owner of Udenna said an intra-corporate complaint for injunction, nullification and damages with application for issuance of TRO and/or writ of preliminary injunction was
filed Friday with the Regional Trial Court of Manila. “Essentially, the complaint just seeks to enforce the right of Udenna Investments as shareholder to participate in the management of KGLI-NM and enjoin Negros Holdings Management Corporation/KGLINM from excluding Udenna Investments in participating in such management,” he said. Udenna is a diversified holding company engaged in distribution and retailing of petroleum products, commercial shipping, ship management, logistics, financial services, environmental services and property development. “We have not received a copy of the complaint,” 2GO’s Tanlu said.
“Pilipinas Shell prices at P67 per share, the top end of the price guidance ofP65-P67,” BPI Capital chief operating officer Reginaldo Anthony Cariaso said. With a base offer of 275 million shares plus another 16 million shares to cover over-allotment, Pilipinas Shell is expected to raise as much as P19.5 billion in proceeds from the initial public offering. The shares consist of 247.5 million in secondary shares to be sold by selling shareholders and 27.5 million in primary shares. Pilipinas Shell will not receive the proceeds from the sale of secondary shares. This means the oil refiner will get only P1.84 billion in proceeds from the sale of the primary shares, which it plans to use to expand its retail network across the country. Pilipinas Shell, according to an initial filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, had planned to raise as much as P29.7 billion in proceeds from sale of a maximum of 330 million shares at P90 apiece. The oil refiner after the book building process reduced the offering price and the shares as well. Cariaso said Pilipinas Shell reduced the offering price after parent Royal Dutch Shell Plc. did not want its ownership in the oil refiner to drop below 55 percent. With the new offering size, Cariaso said Royal Dutch would keep ownership in Pilipinas
Shell above the 55 percent level. The offering period is set from Oct. 19 to 25 while listing date is scheduled on Nov. 3. Pilipinas Shell is one of the two refining and marketing oil companies in the Philippine with an estimated domestic refined products market share of 24 percent. It operates a 110,000 barrelper-day refinery in Batangas, which recently underwent an upgrade to deliver Euro 4-compliant fuels. Pilipinas Shell as of June 30, 2016 operated a network of 966 Shell Group-branded retail service stations, comprising of 583 retail service stations in Luzon, 160 in Visayas and 223 in Mindanao, offering fuel-based products, lubricants, non-fuel products and services. Pilipinas Shell will be the third company to be listed with the Philippine Stock Exchange this year. The first two were Golden Haven Memorial Park Inc. and Cemex Holdings Philippines Inc.
Investors Chemist bringing spirit of Johnnie Walker back to life cite BDO for good practices By Thomas Buckley
BDO Unibank was named as one of the 15 recipients of the inaugural Institutional Investors Governance Awards, a recognition given to companies that have registered high marks in the Asean Corporate Governance Scorecard. The ACGS provides a rigorous methodology benchmarked against international best practice to assess the corporate governance performance of publicly listed companies in six participating Asean member-countries. It is a useful tool to demonstrate Asean members’ commitment to sound corporate governance vital in increasing foreign direct investment into the region. The scorecard was created by the Asean Capital Markets Forum and launched in 2011 as one of the initiatives in preparation for the Asean economic integration in 2015. The award was given during the recent Investors Forum held at the Manila Polo Club given by institutional investors to publicly listed companies, in partnership with the Fund Managers Association of the Philippines, the Philippine Investment Funds Association, the Trust Officers Association of the Philippines and PJS Corporate Support Inc. Aside from BDO, other awardees were SM Prime Holdings Inc.; Manila Water Co. Inc.; Philex Mining Corp.; Aboitiz Equity Ventures Inc.; Globe Telecom Inc.; GT Capital Holdings Inc.; Manila Electric Co.; Ayala Corp.; Ayala Land Inc.; PLDT Inc.; Bank of the Philippine Islands; Energy Development Corp.; International Container Terminal Services Inc.; and Metropolitan Bank & Trust Co.
DR. EMMA Walker was born 121 years after Johnnie Walker died. Her job is to bring his spirit back to life. The 37-year-old chemist fiddles with thousands of test tubes, pipettes and tinted nosing glasses to come up with new incarnations of a whisky first introduced in 1820 by the Scotsman it’s named after and is the world’s best-selling Scotch brand. Johnnie Walker accounts for about one in every 10 bottles of Scotch consumed across the world, but it’s grown tired of late. Sales have been declining the past three years because of competition from bourbon and rye, which are easier to mix into Manhattans and other trendy cocktails. The success of Emma Walker―she’s no relation to Johnnie as far as she knows―could be crucial to Diageo Plc, which relies on its Scotch business for a third of its profit and is examining how to revitalize sales. “It might be that some people see Scotch and Johnnie Walker as something their dad drank,” she says, driving her small red Seat Ibiza the 40 miles home to Edinburgh from Diageo’s technical center at the foot of Scotland’s Ochil Hills after a day’s mixing and sniffing. “But if we can get people reinvigorated, looking at Scotch again, looking at Johnnie Walker again, that would be brilliant.” Left behind Best-known for its bottles of Red Label and Black Label, Johnnie Walker has lost market share every year since 2013. Sales fell 9 percent last year as demand for the upmarket 12-year-old Black Label in Asia was hit by weakening currencies there. A new blend developed by Emma Walker called Red Rye
Emma Walker, whisky specialist and blender at Diageo Plc, tests the aroma of a sample as she poses for a photograph in the Spirit Mastery Room in the Diageo International Supply Centre near Stirling, U.K., on Thursday. Sept. Master blender Jim beveridge in the archive room. 29, 2016. Bloomberg
is the company’s first since revamping Johnnie Walker in September 2015 with an advertising campaign fronted by British actor Jude Law. On the shelves since then, it’s designed to close the gap with other whiskies that have become more popular. Diageo reported a better-than-predicted profit for the year ended June 30, but it was driven by demand for American whiskey, tequila and vodka in the US. “The one thing the Scotch industry hasn’t really found, unlike Irish and bourbon or rye, is its place in the growing market for cocktails based on whisky,” says Tom Russo, a founding partner at hedge fund Gardner Russo & Gardner. “If there’s an activity designed to make a Red Label variant present in an Old Fashioned or a Manhattan, that would make some sense.” Russo manages a stake in Diageo worth about 210 million pounds ($258 million) after the stock price rose as the pound sank following the UK’s vote to leave the European Union. His favorite Johnnie Walker is the “beautiful” Black Label, though he prefers
bourbon in his cocktails and single malt Scotch after dinner. Whisky scientist Red Rye is the first installment of the Johnnie Walker Blenders Batch series. At Diageo’s blending room in the technical center in the village of Menstrie, the “whisky scientist” is busy working on other concoctions with samples of single malts. Red Rye went through hundreds of iterations before its release in the US. Emma Walker said she’d paid little attention to cocktails until she started speaking to bartenders. She now considers the effects of ice, mixers and agitation. “Just having that idea at the forefront of your mind when you’re looking at the age of whiskies, the strength of whiskies, which distillery you’re going to use, the level of fatty acids in the whisky, how they’ll react at certain temperatures, it awakens a different part of your mind, that more chemistry-focused part of your mind,” she says. Master blender Growing up in Scotland and northeast England, her interest in Scotch and science developed
from a young age. She says her father’s nickname in the Royal Navy was “whisky” and she remembers visiting a chemical plant with her school class and being fascinated by how many pipes there were. After completing her doctorate in sulfur oxidation at Sheffield University’s organic chemistry department, she did a stint at drugmaker GlaxoSmithKline Plc developing steroids before joining Diageo in 2008 as a scientist in its Whisky Specialist Team. She now is among the top contenders to get the job as the company’s first female Master Blender after Diageo last year formed a committee of executives to review and drive sales of Scotch. Current Master Blender Jim Beveridge, 64, who has spent almost four decades at the company, is mentoring Walker. “Sometimes the best in the business start as a blank canvas and if you look at Emma’s career, she joined the team from a scientific pharmaceutical background, then she left this team for a while to go into production,” Beveridge says in the Johnnie Walker archive room,
a bright, echoing chamber where 5,000 bottles of old and new blends cover the walls from floor to ceiling. “It’s not technically what she does, but it’s how she does it.” About time Parking up on arrival in Edinburgh from Menstrie, Walker heads to The Bon Vivant, one of her favorite cocktail bars. Her partner, Dave, will drive her home after. The bottle of Red Rye she’s brought with her is met with initial skepticism from the tattooed and bearded mixologists whose candlelit shelves are stocked with small-batch mezcals and craft gins. She explains that the blending team in Menstrie is playing around with liquids at different phases of aging, looking into different raw materials such as roasted malt. Johnnie Walker wants to drive innovation, she says. “Gingerbread, Christmas cake and a little spice, this is definitely one of the nicer ones I’ve tried,” bartender Will Cox says before Walker asks him to mix an Old Fashioned and a Manhattan. “It’s about time you guys branched out a bit.” Bloomberg