Biz Buzz: Strong hands

Who’s worried about today’s listing of DoubleDragon Properties Corp. while the local bourse is in the middle of a deep bear market?

Certainly not the company’s two coowners, Tony Tancak

tiong and Edgar “Injap” Sia II, it seems.

Biz Buzz learned recently that a large chunk of the property developer’s follow-on share sale was cornered by a large international fund manager that had long been looking for an attractive investment in the Philippines.

OK, let’s correct that. The fund is not just large, it’s huge. How huge? We’re talking about over $1.5 trillion in assets under management around the world. They’re that big, and DoubleDragon’s P4.5-billion offer is just a drop in the bucket for them.

Nonetheless, its fund managers see the property company as a good investment proxy for the Philippines’ growth story, we’re told, the ongoing bear market notwithstanding.

More importantly, while many of the company’s retail investors understandably have shorter-term investment horizons, this foreign fund is known to hold on to its portfolio investments for an average of at least seven years. That should provide some degree of stability to the firm’s stock price while the bears are in charge of the market.

And while DoubleDragon’s capital raising looks small by the standards of other larger corporations, it’s worth remembering that they conducted their initial public offering four years ago to raise only P1.1 billion, with boutique investment house Unicapital as its underwriter (later joined by BDO Capital and RCBC Capital).

Today, they’re raising four times as much money, with heavyweights Credit Suisse, UBS, Maybank-Kim Eng and BPI Capital in their corner—all backed up by the financial muscle of a global investment fund. Talk about ‘strong hands.’.