Malaysia’s JobStreet is selling its online job portal business to Australia’s SEEK Ltd for RM1.73bil (S$661 million) cash

February 26, 2014 Leave a comment

JobStreet to pay almost all of $661 million from sale of online business as dividend

Thursday, Feb 20, 2014

The Star/Asia News Network

PETALING JAYA, Malaysia – JobStreet Corp Bhd, which is selling its online job portal business to Australia’s SEEK Ltd for RM1.73bil (S$661 million) cash, says it will return just about all the proceeds to shareholders as special cash dividend.

This works out to approximately RM2.72 per share.

At last look, Jobstreet shares were traded at RM2.68.

The stock was suspended to make way for this announcement yesterday and will resume trading today.

In a statement to Bursa Malaysia, JobStreet said the proposed disposal to SEEK Asia Investments Pte Ltd was effectively for the sale of all of the company’s online job portal businesses in Malaysia, Singapore, the Philippines, Indonesia and Vietnam.

SEEK plans to combine JobStreet and JobsDB, its majority-owned Asian online employment business, and said that it “will unlock large growth opportunities.”

“This acquisition is a continuation of SEEK’s expansion in the strategic and high growth Asian region,” it said in a statement.

The deal to acquire the remaining 78 per cent of shares SEEK does not own in JobStreet is subject to regulatory and shareholder approval.

SEEK first became a substantial shareholder in JobStreet in September 2008 after it bought 31 million shares or close to 10 per cent in the company. It now owns 22.18 per cent of the company.

CIMB and Goldman Sachs are acting as SEEK’s financial advisors, Baker & McKenzie and SBA Law are the legal advisors and PriceWaterhouse-Coopers is the accounting and tax advisor to SEEK.

HwangDBS Investment Bank Bhd is the principal adviser for this deal here.

JobStreet covers the employment markets in Malaysia, Singapore, the Philippines, Indonesia, India, Japan, Thailand and Vietnam, and currently services over 80,000 corporate customers and has over 11 million jobseekers in its database.

Meanwhile, JobStreet reported a lower net profit of RM13.16mil or 2.08 sen per share for its fourth quarter ended Dec 31 compared with a net profit of RM14.83mil or 2.32 sen per share for the same period a year earlier.

It said recruitment activities tend to slow down towards year-end and during major holidays. Revenue stood at RM41.5mil against RM36.4mil.

It also declared a dividend of 1.75 sen per share, bringing total dividend for the entire year to seven sen per share.

 

Filed under Macro Trends, TMT Trends

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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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