On Dec 31, MCT announced plans to buy MNACT, seeking to create the seventh-largest REIT in Asia with an expected market valuation of about S$10.5 billion.
MNACT’s main portfolio includes one commercial property in Hong Kong and two in China, while MCT is a Singapore-focused REIT.
Quarz, which is run by Jan Moermann, a former Swiss banker, said it supports the deal rationale but objects to the merger ratio and price.
“Quarz has been approached by many MNACT unitholders on MCT’s inferior offer for MNACT. We agree that the offer is value destructive to unitholders and significantly undervalues MNACT,” Moermann and Havard Chi, Quarz’s Singapore-based research head, said in the letter.
MCT offered to acquire all units of MNACT in exchange for MCT units, or a combination of both cash and MCT units that gave the target’s unitholders S$1.19 per unit.
This represented a 7.6 per cent premium to MNACT’s Dec 27 closing price of S$1.11 and was based on MCT’s unit price of S$2. The companies said the offer was in line with MNACT’s net asset value (NAV) per unit.
Since then, MCT’s units have fallen 8.5 per cent to S$1.83 as of Wednesday’s close, while MNACT’s were unchanged at S$1.1.
Quarz argued in the letter that the offer price represented one of the “highest discounts to net asset value in the 20-year history of the Singapore REIT market with multiple takeovers and mergers.”
“MNACT’s board and management should initiate a transparent and robust process to sell the assets above NAV of S$1.23 instead of recommending the suboptimal offer of S$1.08 to S$1.10 from MCT,” Quarz said.
It added it was confident MNACT would stage a strong recovery from the second half of 2022, citing global vaccination rates.
Singapore’s REIT market is dominated by retail investors who are attracted to the high dividends paid by trusts as the firms are mandated to pay out 90 per cent of their rental income. Founded in 2011, Quarz has publicly campaigned against about a dozen Singapore-listed firms.
It mustered support to block a merger in 2020 between two Singapore REITs, whose managers are owned by a unit of Asian logistics giant ESR Cayman Ltd, marking a rare victory for activist funds in the city.