London Sumatra to offer 38.8m shares
London Sumatra to offer 38.8m shares
JAKARTA (JP): PT PP London Sumatra Indonesia (Lonsum) will
sell 38.8 million new shares to the public next month to raise
funds for its expansion projects.
Lonsum's president, Geoffrey Brown, said yesterday that the
shares to be offered will represent 19.2 percent of its total
shares.
Brown declined to quantify the total proceeds expected from
the share offering but he said that the company will allocate
US$26 million of the funds for debt repayment, $24 million for an
expansion project in South Sumatra, and the rest to strengthen
its working capital.
"The shares will be priced at 11 to 13 times the estimated
1996 earning per share," Lonsum's finance director, David Adams,
said.
Lonsum, which operates 19 plantations totaling 55,000 hectares
in North Sumatra, Java and Sulawesi, has formally applied to list
its shares on the Jakarta and Surabaya stock exchanges.
The expansion projects to be financed by proceeds from the
public offering are expected to double the amount of land for
cultivation and the output of crude palm oil, he said in a
statement.
The company's activities include the cultivation, harvesting
and processing of oil palm, rubber and, to a lesser extent,
cocoa, tea and coffee.
Brown said that in 1995, sales revenues amounted to Rp 188.6
billion (US$81.7 million), with net profits of Rp 61.4 billion
($26.6 million).
He said that the company has in recent years averaged more
than five tons of crude palm oil per hectare, which is at least
10 percent higher than yields gained by other large Southeast
Asian plantations companies.
London Sumatra's operations were established in 1906 in North
Sumatra. It was part of Harrisons and Crosfield, a pioneer in the
plantation industry on Indonesia, and was purchased by the Napan
Group in 1994.
At present, 75 percent of London Sumatra's shares are held by
PT Pan London Sumatra Plantation (PPLS) and 25 percent by Happy
Cheer Limited (HCL). Both PPLS and HCL are now owned by
businessmen Andry Pribadi, Ibrahim Risjad and Henry Liem.
The public offering will reduce PPLS ownership to 60.6 percent
and that of HCL to 20.2 percent, with the investing public
holding another 19.2 percent.(hen)