Indonesia’s Widjaja family moves to delist Sinarmas Land from SGX; more large-cap exits on horizon

SINGAPORE - An entity controlled by Indonesia’s billionaire Widjaja family has made a voluntary unconditional cash offer for all the shares in Sinarmas Land that it does not already own at 31 cents apiece.

The offer on March 27 values the Singapore-listed property developer at $1.32 billion.

The offeror, Lyon Investments – which counts executive chairman Franky Oesman Widjaja, chief executive officer Muktar Widjaja and Ms Margaretha Natalia Widjaja among its directors – currently holds about 70.3 per cent of the total number of issued shares in Sinarmas Land.

Shares of Sinarmas Land jumped on the news, rising as much as 23.6 per cent to 34 cents on March 28, before closing at 32 cents, up 16.4 per cent.

The offer price represents a 12.7 per cent premium over Sinarmas Land’s last traded price of 27.5 cents per share on March 24, before the company called for a trading halt on March 25 before the market opened.

It also represents a premium of about 17.1 per cent, 5.6 per cent and 14.6 per cent over the volume-weighted average price of the shares over the last one-, three- and 12-month periods, respectively.

However, the offer price is at a 73.9 per cent discount to Sinarmas Land’s net asset value of $1.19 per share as at June 30, 2024.

The offeror said the trading liquidity of the shares on the Singapore Exchange (SGX) in the past year has generally been thin, and that the offer allows shareholders to “realise a clean cash exit at a premium”.

It added that it was making the offer to delist the company from SGX’s mainboard.

This will give the management more flexibility to manage the business, optimise the use of its management and capital resources, and facilitate the implementation of any operational change without the attendant costs, regulatory restrictions and compliance issues associated with its listed status, it said.

Trading in shares of Sinarmas Land will be suspended should less than 10 per cent of its total number of shares be held in public hands at the end of the offer.

The offeror said that in this event, it does not intend to support or take any step for the public float to be restored or for any trading suspension to be lifted.

It added that it intends to exercise its right of compulsory acquisition, should it manage to acquire at least 90 per cent of shares it did not already own before the offer.

The Widjaja family, which controls the Sinar Mas Group, is estimated to have a net worth of US$18.9 billion (S$25.3 billion) as at end-December, according to Forbes, ranking it the fourth-richest in Indonesia.

The conglomerate has interests in a wide range of businesses, including paper, property and banking.

In 2023, the family took coal miner Golden Energy and Resources private from SGX.

The family has another listed vehicle on the SGX in the form of palm oil player Golden Agri-Resources, with a market capitalisation of around $3.4 billion. Mr Franky Oesman Widjaja is its chairman and CEO.

More delistings expected

More privatisations of SGX counters are imminent, with at least one multibillion-dollar company set to exit, a top corporate lawyer told The Business Times.

Ms Sandy Foo, deputy head of the corporate and transactional group at Big Four law firm Rajah & Tann, is currently handling “a handful” of privatisation deals – all involving mainboard SGX counters.

Ms Foo, who is also the head of mergers and acquisitions at the firm, could not disclose company names due to confidentiality. She was speaking to BT ahead of a mergers and acquisitions panel organised by the Singapore Academy of Law, scheduled for next week.

“The deal values are pretty much in the hundreds of millions to the multibillion,” she said.

Reasons cited for delisting include providing minority shareholders an exit option ahead of restructuring, or because stock prices are trading “at far below” what sponsors, founders and shareholders consider fair value.

Said Ms Foo: “And so they think – with all the cost of governance and listing fees – maybe we’re better off just taking it off the market.”

None of these companies intend to relist elsewhere, to her knowledge.

The ongoing deals, depending on their completion timelines, could push total delistings in 2025 to double digits, matching recent trends.

Ms Foo expects delistings to continue to outpace listings in 2025, in line with the broader market consensus.

Thus far in 2025, at least four companies – 5E Resources, Jes International, Dyna-Mac and Silverlake Axis – have confirmed or completed delistings. There have been no new listings yet.

In 2024, 20 companies exited the SGX, compared with just four new listings. The year before, 2023, recorded 25 delistings against six initial public offerings.

However, Singapore is not alone in experiencing this trend, Ms Foo noted.

In 2024, the London Stock Exchange saw 88 companies either delist or transfer their primary listing away from the main market – the highest since 2009 – against only 18 new listings.

“The lawyers in London were bemoaning about how there will be nothing left for them to privatise, and I just looked at them – welcome to my world! We’ve been saying this for a few years,” Ms Foo said.

Looking ahead, she expressed “optimism” that recent recommendations from the Monetary Authority of Singapore’s equities review group would help attract new listings to the local bourse.

She said: “We are Singapore, (and) I think when we put our minds to something, and we work at it together collectively, we do yield results. We just have to be patient about it.”

THE BUSINESS TIMES