State-run Chunghwa Telecom Co (中華電信) may again postpone a long-awaited issue of American depository receipts (ADRs) to next year after the terrorist attacks in the US, a report said yesterday.
Goldman Sachs, lead underwriter for Chunghwa's overseas share offer, has recommended the Ministry of Transportation and Communications delay the issue to February or April next year, Chinese-language media said.
Preparation for the ADR issue at the end of this year has been halted due to the battering of US stock markets in the wake of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks in the US, the newspaper said.
The issue has already been postponed repeatedly since December, largely due to the poor performance of the Taiwan share market.
The ministry planned to sell 12 percent of Chunghwa through the ADR issue and had set a timetable to reduce its shareholding to less than 40 percent by the end of this year from the current 95.3 percent.
But the ministry's plan would not be completed this year or next year because of the poor response to offers in domestic and overseas share markets, the paper said.
Chunghwa was listed on the local stock market in October last year, although the share sale met with a poor response from investors.
Late last month, Chunghwa chairman Mao Chi-kuo (
"A year-end sale is impossible," Mao said. "It's too short a time period and too big a volume."
The government is re-examining a timetable that called for half the company to be sold to private investors by December.
Disagreements between the government and investors about the price at which the shares would be sold abroad prompted Chunghwa's bankers, Goldman Sachs Group Inc, Merrill Lynch & Co and UBS Warburg, to recommend postponing the sale, Mao said.
To date, the government has managed to sell off 4.6 percent of Chunghwa. When it began to privatize the company last year, it said it hoped to sell a third of the company by the end of last year and about half by the end of this year.
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