LCY Chemical Corp (李長榮化工) yesterday said that it would return to the local equity market within five years after it gained shareholders’ approval to proceed with a takeover by a consortium of investors led by KKR & Co.
More than 80 percent of shareholders approved plans to delist the firm from the Taiwan Stock Exchange (TWSE) and carry out a stock swap with an investment holding company that would carry out LCY’s takeover.
KKR plans to relist LCY shares on the local bourse in five years’ time after it implements transition plans, and expands into electronic-grade chemicals and expanded polypropylene foam, LCY chairman Hung Tsai-hsing (洪再興) told an extraordinary general meeting in Taipei yesterday.
Hung said that the company has no plans to apply for listing on the Shanghai Stock Exchange.
The company has been severely affected by its implication in a series of gas explosions in Kaohsiung in 2014, prompting the management team to seek help from foreign investors to provide shareholders a chance to unload their holdings at a premium.
LCY also announced that its buyout price has been adjusted from NT$56 per share to NT$53.1 to account for a cash dividend of NT$2.9 per share to shareholders in a NT$45.4 billion (US$1.47 billion) deal.
The takeover is to be carried out by a joint venture set up by Carlton (Luxembourg) Holdings SARL, an associate and a member of a consortium led by KKR.
Regarding some shareholders’ questions about the terms of the takeover, the company reiterated that the NT$56 buyout price is higher than the stock’s closing price over the past five years, prior to the gas explosions.
Shareholders who disagree with the buyout share price have the right to contest the matter in court, Hung said.
Former LCY chairman Bowei Lee (李謀偉) and other members of the Lee family who founded the company are to control a 45 percent stake in the joint venture, with KKR holding the remaining 55 percent.
Lee, 63, said in an open letter that he and the Lee family have taken on significant bank loans to fund the buyout arrangement.
Lee, who faces a four-year prison sentence over charges stemming from the explosions, said that he has begun planning for retirement and to distance the company’s owners from management.
The windfall from the takeover would be used to offset a portion of investment losses and to repay debts from the company’s loss-making foray into green energy, he said.
SECOND-RATE: Models distilled from US products do not perform the same as the original and undo measures that ensure the systems are neutral, the US’ cable said The US Department of State has ordered a global push to bring attention to what it said are widespread efforts by Chinese companies, including artificial intelligence (AI) start-up DeepSeek (深度求索), to steal intellectual property from US AI labs, according to a diplomatic cable. The cable, dated Friday and sent to diplomatic and consular posts around the world, instructs diplomatic staff to speak to their foreign counterparts about “concerns over adversaries’ extraction and distillation of US AI models.” Distillation is the process of training smaller AI models using output from larger, more expensive ones to lower the costs of training a powerful new
Shares of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) have repeatedly hit new highs, but an equity analyst said the stock’s valuation remains within a reasonable range and any pullback would likely be technical. The contract chipmaker’s historical price-to-earnings (P/E) ratio has ranged between 20 and 30, Cathay Futures Consultant Co (國泰證期) analyst Tsai Ming-han (蔡明翰) told Central News Agency. With market consensus projecting that TSMC would post earnings per share of about NT$100 (US$3.17) this year, supported by strong global demand for artificial intelligence (AI) applications, and the stock currently trading at a P/E ratio of below 25, Tsai said the valuation
The artificial intelligence (AI) boom has triggered a seismic reshuffling of global equity markets, with Taiwan and South Korea muscling past European nations one by one. With its stock market now valued at nearly US$4.3 trillion, Taiwan surpassed the UK, Europe’s biggest market, earlier this month, data compiled by Bloomberg showed. South Korea is about US$140 billion away from doing the same. The tech-heavy Asian markets have shot past Germany and France in the past seven months. The shift is largely down to massive gains in shares of three companies that provide essential hardware for AI: Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電),
The US Department of Commerce last week ordered multiple chip equipment companies to halt shipments of certain tools to China’s second-largest chipmaker, Hua Hong Semiconductor Ltd (華虹半導體), its latest action to slow the country’s development of advanced chips, two people familiar with the matter said. The department sent letters to at least a handful of companies informing them of restrictions on tools and other materials destined for two Hua Hong facilities US officials believe make China’s most sophisticated chips, the people said. Top US chip equipment companies Lam Research Corp, Applied Materials Inc and KLA Corp, each of which has significant
RSS