PETALING JAYA: TA Research has reiterated its advice to Malaysia Airports Holdings Bhd
’s (MAHB) investors to take up the takeover offer by a consortium led by Khazanah Nasional Bhd and the Employees Provident Fund.
It noted that the joint offerors have extended a conditional takeover offer to acquire all the remaining shares in MAHB for a cash consideration of RM11 per share.
The offer will be valid until 5pm on Jan 8, 2025 and is conditional on acceptance levels that will raise the effective stake of the consortium members in MAHB to 90%.
Regarding the advice from independent directors to reject the takeover offer, TA Research said: “We do not think it would significantly influence investors’ decisions as none of the five independent directors have a substantial stake in MAHB to block the deal.”
Furthermore, the research house also doubts their ability to influence the board to seek alternative deals, which could offer more than RM11 per share in a short period of time.
“If the joint offerors achieve less than 90% stake in MAHB, they can revise it to a lower percentage,” added TA Research.
More importantly, the research house said it believed that the price of MAHB shares would fall to a level that reflects the fundamental valuation without any controlling premium, if the deal falls through.
Hence, TA Research has made no changes to MAHB’s earnings projections for 2024 to 2026.
“We maintain our discounted cash flow valuation at RM10.74 per share and the target price at RM11 per share on MAHB to match the take-over offer,” said the research house.
On another note, TA Research said MAHB was on track to end the year on a high note.
Robust growth in travel saw the airport operator record 7.7 million passenger movements for Malaysian operations in November, up 16% year-on-year (y-o-y).
This was fuelled by the strong 21.1% growth in the international sector, as well as a decent 10.6% growth in the domestic sector.
For the first 11 months of 2024, the growth in cumulative passenger movements in Malaysia expanded slightly to 14.8% from 14.6% a month ago, to 85.1 million.
The strong traffic momentum was supported by new airline operations, the introduction of five new routes and 42 additional weekly flights.
AirAsia launched KLIA to Da Lat, Vietnam (four weekly flights), to Chiang Rai, Thailand (three weekly flights) and to Port Blair in the Nicobar Islands, India (three weekly flights), as well as from Kota Kinabalu International Airport (Sabah) to Kaohsiung, Taiwan (four weekly flights).
Similarly, passenger movements in the international sector have been encouraging, rising 21% y-o-y to 4.1 million in November.
Compared with the pre-pandemic period, this was a steady recovery to 94% of 2019 levels.
The growth was mainly driven by the non-Asean sector.
For 2025, the operating environment is expected to remain buoyant on the back of optimism about travel industry, supported by visa-free entry and increasing airline capacity.
On top of that, the two large events to be hosted by Malaysia in 2025, the Asean Summit and World Tourism Day, are also expected to boost foreign visits to Malaysia.
