Thursday 11 December 2014

Opportunities in 3 SPACs? (2)

I have received very helpful comments from "Malaysia Stock Talk", who pointed at the following paragraph from the IPO brochure of CLIQ:




So for people who plan to vote against any qualifying acquisition, they will indeed get their cash pro rata to their shares.

I guess there are three categories of investors:

  • Category A who invests now, to gain an almost risk-free return, voting against any acquisition;
  • Category B who supports the management, who believes in the company and who will vote in favour of acquisitions; this could include investors who bought their shares at a higher price and might incur a loss if they vote against the acquisition;
  • Category C of people who haven't yet made up their mind.

An acquisition will go through:

 
 
Approval might be an issue if Category A becomes larger and larger. And that chance increases if the price stays low, and investors buy shares to profit from the arbitrage.
 
It also makes planning by the management difficult, not knowing how many people might vote against the acquisition(s).
 

If there is no acquisition within the approved time period, then the SPAC will dissolve and return the remaining money. In that case a lot of work has been done for nothing, and quite a few expenses have been incurred.

And warrant holders might be the proud owners of a worthless piece of paper.

4 comments:

  1. SPACs look to be attractive investment class after all. Investors do have a choice.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Is the trust $$ absolutely guaranteed to be protected? I.e. it can't be used to for initial due diligence costs associated with potential acquisitions, day-to-day operational costs etc?
    I was surprised to see Sona has very swanky offices in Petronas Tower 3 near Bloomberg - with no revenue, how's it paying for this?

    ReplyDelete
  3. Hi Wammo, as far as I understand, the IPO money is split in two parts, the large part will be used for investments, held in trust, SC oversees it; a small part is for expenses (management wages, rental, due d on potential acquisitions etc.

    ReplyDelete