CK Asset raises share buyback by 14 per cent after asset injection from Li Ka Shing Foundation

Company offers to buy back 380 million shares, absorbing all of the 333.3 million shares to be issued for asset purchases from Li Ka-shing Foundation

Offer price stays at HK$51 each; company pledges to buy from market if acceptance falls below 380 million shares

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Close up of a corporate flag outside the Cheung Kong Center photographed in Central. Photo: Dickson Lee

Published: 11:29am, 15 Apr 2021Updated: 11:29am, 15 Apr 2021

CK Asset Holdings, one of the listed flagships of Hong Kong’s richest billionaire Li Ka-shing, plans to spend an additional HK$2.4 billion (US$309 million) to boost its stock buyback programme and restore the family’s stake in the group.

The company, the city’s second-largest developer by market value, will offer to buy back 380 million shares at HK$51 each or HK$19.4 billion, according to an exchange filing late Wednesday. That is an increase from 333.3 million shares previously proposed in March.

The offer price represents an 8.3 per cent premium over its last traded price of HK$47.10 in Hong Kong on Wednesday. Once the buyback is completed, it will increase the Li family’s control from about 36 per cent to 41.3 per cent, it added.

The buyback initiative is CK Asset’s first in more than two years. Its stock peaked at HK$74.60 in February 2018. Since January last year, however, the share price has been on a general downtrend.

Hong Kong’s richest man Li Ka-shing. Photo: @lksfoundation/ Instagram

CK Asset said the bigger buyback was based on “feedback received from shareholders” after the group proposed in March to buy minority stakes in four UK and Dutch power and water utility companies from Li Ka Shing Foundation for HK$17 billion, payable by issuing 333.3 million new shares.