In a stunning move, Singapore and Indonesia-based mobile social networking company mig33 is now listed on the Australian Securities Exchange (ASX)

January 24, 2014 Leave a comment

Mig33 is now listed on the Australian Securities Exchange
January 23, 2014
by Willis Wee
In a stunning move, Singapore and Indonesia-based mobile social networking company mig33 is now listed on the Australian Securities Exchange (ASX), the country’s primary stock exchange.
It did so via a reverse takeover, in which a listed company acquires a private company only for the shareholders of the latter to become majority owners of the combined group, a purportedly easier and less rigorous process than listing through the usual way.
In this case, mig33 is actually acquired by Latin Gold, an Australian company that does mineral exploration and project investigation. It now owns 720 million of Latin Gold Limited’s (ASX:LAT) shares. According to Google Finance, Latin Gold was traded at AUD$0.02 per share as of January 23. In other words, mig33 is valued at $12.73 million after the shares acquisition at the current share price. The numbers will obviously change as the share price changes.
The acquisition will see mig33 own 69.5 percent of Latin Gold while Latin Gold shareholders will own approximately 30.5 percent of the merged group. Founder and CEO Steven Goh, together with Andy Zain, Dmitry Levit, and John Lee will be appointed to the Latin Gold board.
Meanwhile, three of the Latin Gold directors will step down, which gives mig33 full authority to drive the Latin Gold business. Latin Gold’s name will be changed to mig33. As of yesterday, the company has halted trading on ASX due to a change of business activities. Goh told Tech in Asia:
We believe in the opportunity to bulk mig33 up to something much more interesting now and being listed allows us to realize that opportunity. [We] looked at Singapore and Australia [and believe that] Australia is a simpler, less risky, and easier path to getting there. Additionally, Australian tech companies are getting recognized valuation-wise and there is a history of billion dollar exits, whereas in Singapore the feedback is mixed.
There’s a precedent of Asian internet companies listing in Australia, with Patrick Grove’s iBuy being a prominent example. It raised $33 million through its IPO.
When we spoke with mig33 after its rebranding and transformation into a mini-blogging platform in October last year, the company was seeing 180,000 daily active users sending four million messages daily. It now has about three million monthly active users.

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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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