AC ENERGY Corp. has set a follow-on offering of up to 2 billion primary shares in a move that could raise up to P16.4 billion for the Ayala-led company with aspirations to become Southeast Asia’s largest listed renewable energy platform.
“[T]he Company’s Executive Committee approved today an FOO (follow-on offering) price range of P6.00-P8.20 per share and a primary share issuance size of up to two billion shares,” AC Energy said in a stock market disclosure on Thursday.
It added that the total offering size would include secondary shares, but the number would be determined at a later date.
Eric T. Francia, the company’s president and chief executive officer, said in a media briefing on Monday that he was looking at a P30-billion cash infusion from AC Energy’s sale of shares this year, including the P5.37 billion raised in a stock rights offering that took place from Jan. 18 to 22.
In November last year, he said in a briefing that the follow-on offering was one of the five steps that the firm was undertaking in its corporate restructuring and transformation.
The other steps are: a stocks rights offering in the first quarter; the Singapore-based GIC Pte. Ltd. private placement of 4 billion shares by the end of the second quarter; the infusion of the international energy assets; and the sale of secondary shares from parent firm AC Energy and Infrastructure Corp to GIC.
“Between the capital raising, SRO (stock rights offering), private placement and FOO, that’s a significant amount of cash that we will be raising that could reach up to P30 billion of cash infusion this year,” he said, adding that the figure was a rough estimate.
He said that “a lot of this” would depend on the size of the firm’s upcoming follow-on offering.
AC Energy aims to install 5 gigawatts of renewable energy capacity by 2025, a target that it expects to exceed ahead of schedule.
Mr. Francia said that the firm projected to get to the halfway mark this year, with funding from its various capital-raising activities and opportunities in foreign markets.
“We expect to be in the two-and-a-half gigawatt mark between our Philippine and international platform[s]. Right now, we are about 1,350 megawatts (MW). We have around 900 MW in international and 450 [MW] in the Philippines, so combined renewables is 1,350 [MW],” he said.
Mr. Francia said that projects using solar and wind technologies would take up a huge chunk of the company’s capacity by 2025.
“I don’t have a specific percent breakdown between solar and wind, but what I can tell you is, solar and wind will have the lion’s share of our technology mix,” he said. “Solar is most likely going to be larger in terms of installed capacity over wind.”
During AC Energy’s five-day stock rights offering period last month, it sold a total of 2,267,580,434 common shares at an offer price of P2.37 per share to eligible stockholders of record as of Jan. 13.
On Thursday, shares in AC Energy shed 6.84% or 0.53 centavos to finish at P7.21 apiece. — Angelica Y. Yang