ING Bank N.V. Manila invests add’l P20M in IPVG

IPVG Corp. raised an additional P20 million through the issuance of shares to ING Bank N.V. Manila Branch (Trust Department), increasing the total amount of fresh equity raised over the last 30 days to P750 million.

In a disclosure to the Philippine Stock Exchange, IPVG said it has executed an agreement with ING Bank for the subscription of an additional 2.5 million shares of the company at P8 per share.

This purchase increased ING Bank’s investment in IPVG to P370 million.  Last Tuesday, IPVG executed subscription agreements with Philippine Equity Partners Inc. and RCBC Capital for the issuance of 16 million IPVG shares also at P8 per share for a total of P128 million.

Proceeds from the share sale will be used to fund the expansion of IPVG’s three core businesses – data center, online games and contact center.   This will also allow the company  to invest in new capital equipment, fixed assets as well as increase its working capital for business expansion.

IPVG president Enrique Gonzalez said the company increased the size of its offering to meet the strong demand for its shares.

“Due to strong interest and oversubscription for our private placement, our board has extended and increased the size of our offering. With this, we have now officially completed our private placement offering,” he said.

With P750 million in fresh equity, IPVG is now more than well funded to pursue its strategic acquisitions. American Orient Capital Partners served as IPVG’s financial advisor for the share sale.

With the highly successful private placement of its shares, IPVG is keen on further growing operations to boost profitability.

“Investors are now recognizing IPVG as a high growth company with a strong management team. We are extremely execution-oriented, and we will deliver on our targets. It is our intention to take this company to the next level in terms of revenues and profitability. We will deploy this newly raised capital prudently, focusing on the expansion of our core businesses regionally. We expect to complete a few landmark acquisitions within the second half of 2007,” Gonzalez said.

IPVG aims to become a regional operator of Internet data centers, online games and a regionally integrated business process outsourcing (BPO) company.

It has teamed up with Hong Kong-based telecom giant PCCW to set up call centers in the country and has ventured into the Internet gaming café business through its partnership with Sabinclub.com, a Korean IT company that recently opened its second branch of high-end Internet café in Vito Cruz, Manila.

Over the last two years, IPVG has made a significant impact on the local IT scene by turning around the Internet data center business, and establishing itself as the number one online games publisher accounting for more than 50 percent market share.

Meanwhile, in yesterday’s issue of The STAR, the story entitled ‘IPVG raises additional P128 M with PhilEquity, RCBC buy-in,’ Philippine Equity Partners Inc. was erroneously referred to as PhilEquity when, in fact, these are two separate companies. Philippine Equity Partners, Inc. is a broker/dealer with local and global relationships whereas PhilEquity is a local mutual fund.