ICI - Charts, page-1344

Thinking a bit about the SBB today and the options expiring. To my knowledge we have a quite a large volume of options expiring imminently.

ICIOB : OPTION EXPIRING 31-DEC-2022 - 15,444,349
ICIAF : OPTION EXPIRING 31-DEC-2022 EX $0.05 - 26,444,444

Over 40 million in total.

Until now I was thinking about the SBB as a tool primarily to uphold the share price at a value that the company would deem as fair. They did after-all announce that the reason they introduced the SBB was due to the fact that the share price did not reflect the true value of the business.

However the primary goal of the SBB may be to shrink the number of outstanding shares, and let the share price do it's own talking.

Being that they have the approval to buy back 135million shares, if they sustained their SBB activity until now, we may have seen a large number of options exercised, which would be counter to the objective of reducing outstanding shares. What would be the point of using the SBB to buy and kill shares if it causes a substantial quantity of options to be exercised.

I know the there has already been plenty of discussion around the options expiring to date and why it relates to the SP, but I hadn't thought about it relating to the SBB and reducing the shares out there. Or I might be a bit slow.

All my own speculations. But we may see the SBB kick back in shortly.