Director comment
Biomass power plant builder Helius Energy (LON:HEGY) announced this afternoon that it plans to raise £6.6 million via a share placing at 16 pence per share.
Helius’s shares responded by putting on 13.6 per cent in mid-afternoon trading to hit 15.9 pence. Towards the close of the session, the shares had fallen back to 14 pence.
Helius said that a fundraising at a premium to this morning’s share price demonstrated the company’s ability to attract investment from a number of high-quality new and existing institutional and other investors.
“I think it’s a cracking result in this market,” said the firm’s chief financial officer, Alan Lyons. “Most placings done at the moment are at a substantial discount to the share price.”
Lyons pointed out that the placing price was not only achieved at a premium to Helius’s recent share price but it represented a premium to Helius’s average price over the past couple of months.
The funds will be used to strengthen Helius’s balance sheet and provide additional working capital to allow the company to progress its immediate and longer-term pipeline of projects, including seeking to secure: project-level funding for the firm’s Avonmouth power project; and planning consent for its Southampton project.
Lyons said that a key use of the funds will be to bring Avonmouth to the point of financial close, when the firm would expect to receive a fee of around £10 million. In return Helius will be happy to be diluted down to a minority stake in the Avonmouth plant, added Lyons.
In Helius’s statement concerning the statement this afternoon, Adrian Bowles, Helius’s chief executive officer, commented that the placing “clearly demonstrates that investors have confidence in Helius’s ability to develop high quality projects and the potential to realise value from its portfolio”.
Bowles said that the capital allows the firm to continue to develop a pipeline of other projects, following the financial of Helius’s CoRDe project in Scotland earlier in the year.
An application will be made to the London Stock Exchange for approximately 40.9 million shares to be admitted to trading on the Alternative Investment Market, and admission is expected to occur on 24 October.
