Metro Pacific in talks to buy 35% stake in Axelum Resources
Metro Pacific Investments [MPI 4.03 1.5%] [link] is reported to be involved in talks to purchase a 34.76% stake in Axelum Resources [AXLM 3.50 0.3%] for P5.32 billion.
The reporting by Reuters, based on information from unnamed sources, said that the deal would come with an option for MPI to buy an additional block of shares to convert its minority stake into a majority stake.
The acquisition would be under MPI’s subsidiary, Metro Pacific Agro Ventures Inc, and represents MPI’s largest investment in the agricultural sector since the company’s pivot toward food and food security started in June of 2022 with the P198 million acquisition of The Laguna Creamery.
AXLM is a manufacturer and exporter of premium coconut products that listed on the PSE back in 2019 at P5/share.
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I’m happy to see MPI (or any heavy-hitter for that matter) taking a real swing at the agricultural sector.
MPI talked about looking into the coconut industry back in December, noting that our worldwide position as a coconut products exporter has been degrading over time, and that MPI believes that the country (through MPI, of course) could play a much greater role in the global coconut products trade.
I’m very excited to see how this move might fit into a larger framework of domestic agricultural capacity build-out.
What I’m not happy about, though, is again the presence of a “suspicious pump” in AXLM heading up to this announcement.
For the past 6 months, AXLM has been locked in a P2.33 to P2.68 trading range, with average volume somewhere around 300,000 shares per day.
Then, all of a sudden, starting on January 3, the volume skyrocketed to 2 million, then to 6 million, with the sustained elevated volume all the way to the start of February when the volume exploded again to average 11 million shares per day in the Thursday and Friday trading sessions before the announcement was made.
The price increased 38% in that one-month span. Where did all this volume come from?
Again, just like the other suspicious pumps, it didn’t come from retail.
This is not a surface-level problem, and I’m alarmed by how regularized this has become.
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Merkado Barkada's opinions are provided for informational purposes only, and should not be considered a recommendation to buy or sell any particular stock. These daily articles are not updated with new information, so each investor must do his or her own due diligence before trading, as the facts and figures in each particular article may have changed.
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