Asia’s biggest casino company SJM Executives to Sell Shares Worth as Much as $57M

May 16, 2013 Leave a comment

SJM Executives to Sell Shares Worth as Much as $57M

Two senior executives of SJM Holdings Ltd. (880), Asia’s biggest casino company by revenue, are seeking to raise as much as HK$440 million ($57 million) in a share sale after the stock surged to a record. Chief Executive Officer Ambrose So and Chief Operating Officer Ng Chi Sing are offering 20 million shares at HK$21.50 to HK$22 each, a discount of 2.2 percent to 4.4 percent to yesterday’s close, terms for the deal show. Deutsche Bank AG (DBK) is joint book runner, according to the term sheet.SJM surged 4.9 percent yesterday to close at HK$22.50, the highest level since the 2008 initial public offering, after receiving the Macau government’s final approval to develop its first casino in the Chinese city’s Cotai area, the Asian equivalent of the Las Vegas Strip.

The casino company got official approval for a resort on the 70,468-square-meter site, according to a gazette published by the Macau government yesterday. It has agreed to pay the government 2.15 billion patacas ($269 million).

SJM, which currently runs 20 out of 35 casinos in Macau and has none on the Cotai strip, first won preliminary approval for the land grant in October. It has said it plans to develop as much as 521,435 square meters of total floor area on the site, including a five-star hotel and a casino resort. Macau is granting the land on a renewable 25-year lease, according to yesterday’s gazette.

SJM has informed Macau that it intends to build and operate a gambling resort containing about 700 gaming tables, 1,000 slot machines and about 2,000 hotel rooms on the land, the company said in a stock exchange statement yesterday.

SJM is the last company among Macau’s six casino operators to receive an approval to develop a casino resort in the Cotai area. MGM China (2282)’s $2.6 billion Cotai resort broke ground in February and is set to open by mid-2016.

To contact the reporter on this story: Vinicy Chan in Hong Kong at vchan91@bloomberg.net

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Kee Koon Boon (“KB”) is the co-founder and director of HERO Investment Management which provides specialized fund management and investment advisory services to the ARCHEA Asia HERO Innovators Fund (www.heroinnovator.com), the only Asian SMID-cap tech-focused fund in the industry. KB is an internationally featured investor rooted in the principles of value investing for over a decade as a fund manager and analyst in the Asian capital markets who started his career at a boutique hedge fund in Singapore where he was with the firm since 2002 and was also part of the core investment committee in significantly outperforming the index in the 10-year-plus-old flagship Asian fund. He was also the portfolio manager for Asia-Pacific equities at Korea’s largest mutual fund company. Prior to setting up the H.E.R.O. Innovators Fund, KB was the Chief Investment Officer & CEO of a Singapore Registered Fund Management Company (RFMC) where he is responsible for listed Asian equity investments. KB had taught accounting at the Singapore Management University (SMU) as a faculty member and also pioneered the 15-week course on Accounting Fraud in Asia as an official module at SMU. KB remains grateful and honored to be invited by Singapore’s financial regulator Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) to present to their top management team about implementing a world’s first fact-based forward-looking fraud detection framework to bring about benefits for the capital markets in Singapore and for the public and investment community. KB also served the community in sharing his insights in writing articles about value investing and corporate governance in the media that include Business Times, Straits Times, Jakarta Post, Manual of Ideas, Investopedia, TedXWallStreet. He had also presented in top investment, banking and finance conferences in America, Italy, Sydney, Cape Town, HK, China. He has trained CEOs, entrepreneurs, CFOs, management executives in business strategy & business model innovation in Singapore, HK and China.

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