PSE approves Medilines IPO

MANILA, Philippines — The Philippine Stock Exchange (PSE) has given its go-signal to the initial public offering of Medilines Distributors Inc.

Medilines, which will list with the ticker symbol MEDIC, will offer up to 825 million primary and secondary shares from Nov. 22 to 26 at a price of up to P2.45 per share to raise up to P2 billion.

The final offer price will be determined on Nov. 16.

Listing has been moved to Dec. 7 from the original target of Nov. 25.

The local bourse is eager to welcome a healthcare industry player to its roster, PSE president and CEO Ramon Monzon said.

“The healthcare industry has been in the spotlight since this pandemic broke out. We are pleased to see a company in this space tap the stock market for capital raising. We are hopeful that this IPO will pave the way for other companies in this sector to seek funding from the equities market,” Monzon said.

Proceeds from the IPO would be used by the company to procure existing products and build up its medical consumables inventory and for debt repayment.

Medilines, chaired by Virgilio Villar, brother of tycoon Manuel Villar Jr., is an essential distributor of critical, best-in-class equipment from medical device companies such as Siemens, B. Braun and Varian.

Its portfolio of products under diagnostics imaging, dialysis, and cancer therapy addresses the medical treatment needs of Filipinos especially in the challenging times brought by the pandemic.

“We intend to utilize 541.5 million as initial working capital to expand our product portfolio to include medical consumables which are low-cost yet high margin products that are regularly used by our customers to operate the high value medical equipment that we sell. We intend to use the 743.1 million to retire debt which was used primarily to fund our working capital requirements,” the company said in its prospectus.

Medilines tapped PNB Capital and Investment Corp. as the sole issue manager, lead underwriter and sole bookrunner for the company’s intended stock market debut.

“We are excited to work with Medilines in drawing out another opportunity to bring to the capital market an essential and pandemic-resilient business,” said Gerry Valenciano, president of PNB Capital.

He sees Medilines as the first pure-play healthcare IPO in the Philippines.