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AMTD

Summat’s up at AMTD

And it’s not obvious what is up at AMTD:

Things get more complicated though. Before the Digital IPO there was some shuffling of assets between the three AMTD companies. Nothing unusual in that, get the right assets that you want to float into the company you’re about to float. But a similar asset shuffle after the float is much more unusual. And yet that’s what has been done. Hotel assets have been moved from AMTD Group into AMTD Digital via AMTD IDEA. Half a billion’s worth in fact, although net of debt and so on it’s around $250 million US.

Now, if you’ve a soaring share price then a very useful thing to do is offer some of your very highly valued shares for real assets. This is what Steve Case did when buying Time Warner with AOL stock. One of the deals of the century that was. Not so good for Time Warner shareholders but still.

What AMTD seems to have done is use the very highly valued shares of HKD – recall, the newly floated AMTD Digital – to buy assets from AMTD Group, that parent and unquoted company. Which is really very odd indeed. Because they even used valuations of stock along the line that were higher than market prices to do this.

Might be nice to gamble upon but not what should be considered as an investment perhaps…..