spp take-up

I feel the need to sound a word of warning about forecasts for the success of the just announced SPP.

Richard Sealy's address on Friday used the phrase 'if only 20% of shareholders take up the offer' (or words to that effect) and this phrase was repeated by HSHL in a post of 21.45 tonight. The spread of shareholders printed at the back of last year's Annual Report showed that 450 of 2,385 shareholders at that time had more than 100,000 shares. I'm not aware of any more recent publicly available data on the spread of holdings, but even though there have clearly been a lot more shares issued since I suspect there'd still be only around 20-22% of shareholders with 100k+ shares.

100,000 shares are of course worth only about $2,000 in today's market, so to think that (effectively) all those shareholders will take up $15,000 worth of stock is really quite fanciful, irrespective of how good a long-term deal it may seem.

I may of course now be accused of being negative, but I think that 10% take-up would be a very good result given where the share price sits. I'll be happy to apologise, and accept that I'm overly negative, if 20% or more is the rersult, but I just can't see it.