- Dexus to take over APN Group
- Deal worth $320 million
- Second takeover deal in a fortnight
Within the past fortnight, Dexus (ASX: DXS) has spent just under a billion dollars in acquisitions.
At the end of April, the AMP Property Fund merger was approved, seeing AMP Capital’s most successful portfolio change hands for $400 million in upfront liquidity as well as $50 million in transaction costs.
The merger was a delight for Dexus, the high-performing AMP portfolio adding some $5.4 billion to the already weighty Dexus Wholesale Property Funds’ portfolio worth more than $10 billion.
The news
Dexus announced yesterday that it entered into a binding Scheme Implementation Deed with APN Property Group (ASX: APD).
The proposed deal is for “a subsidiary of Dexus [to] acquire 100% of APN stapled securities for cash consideration of 91.5 cents per stapled security by way of a scheme of arrangement and a trust scheme.”
Total consideration for the take over is $320 million “on a fully diluted basis”, the company adding that “total diluted securities of 349,638,821 includes 20,090,778 unvested employee share options.”
The price
Security pricing is placed at 91.5 cents.
APN said that this represented a “50% premium over the closing price of APN securities of 61.0 cents on 10 May 2021, the last trading day before [the] announcement; 64.3% premium over the 1 month volume-weighted average price of 55.7 cents, and 65.8% premium over the 3 month volume-weighted average price of 55.2 cents.”
The mood and other things
Whilst all this is subject to a unitholder meeting and the eye of an independent expert, KPMG Corporate Finance has been appointed, and APN said the APN directors unanimously recommend security holders vote in favour of the Dexus takeover.
Also, “APN’s Chairman and largest security holder, Chris Aylward, via his related entities, has granted a call option to Dexus over APN securities equivalent to 19.9% of issued capital, at the Offer Price (‘Call Option Agreement’), exercisable in certain circumstances.”
