Shares in the Bank of Queensland relisted yesterday after the first stage of a $450 million capital raising, and contrary to previous belief, the damage to the share prices wasn’t too heavy.
The Bank told the market that it had strong support from institutions for the capital raising and will now push ahead with the retail leg of the cash call.
Shares in the regional lender opened 1.2% lower at $7.21 after coming out of a trading halt this week.
They then bounced to be up nearly 5% or 37c at $7.67 which is a strong vote of confidence from investors.
The shares had closed at $7.30 last Friday. They went into a halt before trading on Monday and came out of the stoppage yesterday morning.
The new shares in the placement were sold at $6.05 each, so there’s a small gain for those institutions which took the new shares.
The bank raised $284 million from institutional investors, including $134 million through the accelerated non-renounceable entitlement offer.
Existing institutions picked up 92% of the entitlements, although the shortfall was covered in a separate offer.
The retail component of the offer, which is fully underwritten, is expected to raise around $166 million and will take a month to wrap up.
That opens next Tuesday, April 3.
"We are very pleased with the strong support we have received from our institutional shareholders and other investors for this equity raising," said BOQ’s managing director Stuart Grimshaw said in the statement.
"The proceeds will be used to ensure Bank of Queensland is one of the best protected banks in Australia," he said.
The success of the issue would be gratifying for retail shareholders who were surprised by the warning earlier this week of a loss of $91 million for the first half of the 2012 financial year, thanks to more than $300 million of write-downs and impairments caused by falling property prices and the impact of last year’s floods in and around Brisbane and southeast Queensland.
The first-half loss of $91 million compares with a $48 million profit in the first-half of last year.
Impairment charges in the half of $328 million will be more than double the $134 million from the same time last year.
