Conglomerate Hoang Anh Gia Lai’s chairman Doan Nguyen Duc will sell 23 million HAGL shares as guaranteed assets to help the company restructure its debts.

The shares will be transferred between Friday and November 25 via put-through transactions, reducing Duc’s ownership in HAGL to 324.77 million shares, or 35.02 per cent of the capital.

The chairman is currently using his 145 million shares as guaranteed assets for corporate bonds that have been issued to Viet Capital Bank, Bac A Bank, HDBank, VPBank and Bank for Investment and Development of Viet Nam (BIDV).

According to HAGL, the agriculture conglomerate has completed negotiations with lenders to allow the company to pay its debts and interest based on the sales of rubber and palm oil products from 2019 onwards.

At present, HAGL is offloading its assets in the business units that are not prioritised, such as the shopping centre-hotel-apartment-office complex in Myanmar’s capital Yangon, collecting debt payments and completing the conversion of corporate bonds into shares for Singapore national wealth fund Temasek Holdings.

HAGL, in early June, issued 137.5 million shares at VND8,000 per share to Temasek to convert corporate bonds worth VND1.1 trillion (some US$49 million). The bonds were issued to the Singaporean fund company in 2010 to fund the Vietnamese firm in developing rubber farms, building hydropower plants, buying copper ore processing machines and providing additional capital.

These actions aimed to narrow the company’s total debt balance and direct financial sources to focus on large-scale exploitation of fruit farms to generate high profits in the near future.

In the first nine months of 2017, HAGL has cut its total debt to VND23.1 trillion from VND27.3 trillion. The conglomerate targets to reduce its total debt to below VND22.3 trillion by the end of 2017.

In the first three quarters, HAGL estimates to post nearly VND4 trillion in combined revenue and nearly VND1.2 trillion in pre-tax profit, which included a third-quarter pre-tax profit of VND166 billion.

In the final quarter of the year, the conglomerate targets combined revenue of VND1.77 trillion and pre-tax profit of VND180 billion.

HAGL is listed on the HCM Stock Exchange under code HAG. The company’s shares fell 1.9 per cent on Friday to VND7,550 (33.5 US cents) per share. — VNS