DUBAI, 1 April 2006 — United Arab Emirates’ Aabar Petroleum Investments Co. announced a bid for Singapore’s Pearl Energy on Thursday, offering to pay S$1.95 per share for the 52 percent stake it does not own.
A statement from the Gulf Arab company said the all-cash offer valued Pearl, Singapore’s only listed upstream oil and natural gas firm, at S$865 million ($533.6 million). It said Aabar wanted to delist Pearl and make it a wholly owned subsidiary.
Shares in Pearl last traded at S$1.98, but Aabar said the offer represented a premium of approximately 18.8 percent to the volume-weighted average price of Pearl’s shares for the last month of trading.
The offer had been expected after Aabar announced it had bought a 48 percent stake in Pearl for S$418 million from the company’s main shareholder.
The sale was structured as an option agreement and triggered Thursday’s automatic buy-out offer for the remaining shares at S$1.95 per share. “If Aabar receives acceptances representing 90 percent or more of the offer shares, it would exercise its rights of compulsory acquisition under Singapore’s Companies Act,” the statement said. Aabar has said it intends to acquire firms in the oil and gas industry to add to its offshore and onshore rigs. The Pearl bid is the latest attempt by an investor from the world’s biggest oil exporting region to snap up a strategic foreign asset.
Gulf Arab investors poured more than $30 billion into foreign takeovers in 2005 — more than in the previous five years combined — as they tried to use record oil revenues to diversify economies that rely heavily on energy exports.
In January Aabar agreed to buy a 48 percent stake in Pearl Energy from Indonesia-based Austindo Group, run by Indonesian businessman George Tahija and owned by the Tahija family. Pearl Energy was founded with backing from the Tahija family in 2002, and its shares have soared — in tandem with rising oil prices — since it went public last April at 70 Singapore cents a share. Pearl Energy announced a pretax profit of $65.23 million for 2005 against a loss of $2.80 million for 2004.
Pearl was producing about 13,000 barrels per day of oil at the end of last year, mainly from fields in Indonesia and Thailand. It had reserves of 26.6 million barrels at the end of September. “The acquisition of existing companies with a proven track record in the oil and gas sector is at the center of Aabar’s growth strategy,” the statement said, adding that Pearl would continue it current line of business.
