Quanta prices $2.16 billion share sale in Taiwan’s record GDS deal

By Scott Murdoch and Yantoultra Ngui

July 30 (Reuters) – Quanta Computer has priced a $2.16 billion sale of global depositary shares (GDS), the Taiwanese laptop and cloud equipment maker said in a stock exchange filing on Thursday, in what is Taiwan biggest GDS sale ever.

• Quanta priced 49 million GDS at $44.17 each, raising a total of $2.16 billion.

• Term sheet seen by Reuters on Wednesday showed the company was offering the GDS, each representing five ordinary shares, in a price range of $43.91 to $44.77 each. The deal is comprised of 245 million new shares.

• The sale would be Taiwan’s largest GDR or GDS offering on record, surpassing Innolux Display’s $1.35 billion GDR sale in 2007, LSEG data showed.

• Quanta said the sale price equals about T$287.06 ($8.83) per share, based on an exchange rate of T$32.495 to the U.S. dollar. The shares will be listed in Luxembourg.

• It added that it will use the money to fund purchases of materials in foreign currencies.

• The new shares will dilute existing shareholders’ ownership by about 5.97%, Quanta said, adding that the sale would not have a material effect on shareholder rights.

• Quanta’s shares dropped 9.9% on Thursday. They have risen 2.6% so far this year, trailing a 37.9% gain in Taiwan’s benchmark index.

• Taiwanese technology stocks have recently come under pressure in a regional selloff tied to concerns about the durability of the artificial intelligence boom.

($1 = 32.4920 Taiwan dollars)

(Reporting by Scott Murdoch in Sydney and Yantoultra Ngui in Singapore; Editing by David Goodman, Mark Potter and Christopher Cushing)