Seaboard Corporation of Delaware, acting in conjunction with Victus Limited, the majority owner of Unga Group, has offered to buy out other minority shareholders at Kshs 40 per share and de-list the company shares from the Nairobi Securities Exchange.
Seaboard of Delaware, owns 2.92% of the company, while Victus, a Kenyan investment company, owns 50.93% of Unga. The turnaround of Unga can be attributed to a strategic partnership with Seaboard and their management of the company. Going by revelations at past company annual general meetings (AGM’s), Seaboard has lent the company funding, and is paid an annual management fee that escalates as Unga gets more profitable. Keen Unga shareholders have also known for years that Seaboard has a right to acquire a majority stake in Unga.
Still, the offer of Kshs 40 per share, which value Unga at Kshs 3.03 billion, and which the Seaboard promoters state is a premium (33% above Unga’s current trading price of Kshs 30) is rather low. The share was trading at Kshs 44 per share two years ago, and one investor puts the company net asset value as at June 2017 at Kshs 52 per share, which will have gone up with the recent rise of the NSE later in the year.
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