Investors have sold about $1.2bn in Euronav shares to Compagnie Maritime Belge as the chief executive of both companies pledged to continue transforming the tanker owner into a diversified play on alternative fuels.
The results of a mandatory tender offer saw stockholders turn over 69.2m shares of New York and Belgium-listed Euronav to CMB, the Saverys family’s privately owned company.
The shares represented 31.5% of Euronav’s outstanding stock and lifted CMB’s stake to about 80.5% of the listed company, or 88.6% if treasury shares not in the market are excluded.
“With the closing of the mandatory takeover offer on Friday, we turn the page on the final piece of the solution for the strategic and structural deadlock in Euronav,” said Alexander Saverys, chief executive of Euronav and CMB.
“We will now sail full steam ahead to execute our value-creating strategy for Euronav and CMB.Tech.”
The move is the latest milestone in a process that began at the end of last year when CMB struck a deal with John Fredriksen that ended a long struggle with the exit of the Norwegian shipping tycoon from his Euronav stake. Fredriksen took much of Euronav’s VLCC fleet to his New York and Oslo-listed Frontline.
CMB followed up that deal by selling to Euronav its CMB.Tech subsidiary, along with its fleet of chemical tankers, container ships, offshore wind vessels and bulkers, and an orderbook of ships to be fuelled by hydrogen or ammonia.
Since then, Euronav’s new chief executive has communicated to investors a plan to rebrand the shipowner as CMB.Tech and focus on creating an investible green shipping company.
Last week, Saverys spoke at a Capital Link conference in New York, which he described as the “lion’s den” of maritime Wall Street, to counter what he called misconceptions about the company and negative analyst feedback to its plan.
Ultimately, 75% of non-CMB shareholders decided to cash out rather than go along for the ride, selling at the same price that Fredriksen and Frontline received.
About 23.6m of the shares were tendered by investors in the US shares, which changed hands for $17.86 apiece, while 45.7m shares were sold in the Belgian offer at the nearly equivalent price of €16.41.
