From the Financial Times' Energy Source:
Get ready. The world’s biggest share issue will be priced on Thursday - and the indications are it will be a resounding success, at least for the company, Petrobras, and its controlling shareholder, the Brazilian government.
Brokers and fund managers are suggesting the offer will be between 30 and 100 per cent oversubscribed. And expectations of such an oversubscription appeared to have boosted Petrobras’s shares: as of 1500 BST, they were outperforming the market in São Paulo - up 1.8 per cent.
Oil giant Petrobras aims to raise up to $77bn, including $43bn worth of shares it will issue to the Brazilian government in exchange for rights to 5bn barrels of oil. There has been uncertainty over the issue process and the massive investment programme it will help finance.
A 30-100 per cent oversubscription would not be overwhelming but, for an offer of this size, it’d be pretty significant.
However, for minority shareholders, the offer looks likely to deliver the dilution analysts have been predicting all along. The government’s overall stake - counting what it owns itself plus what is owned by public sector entities such as the BNDES, the development bank, and Caixa Econômica Federal, the savings bank - looks likely to rise from about 40 per cent before the offer to about 45 per cent afterwards....MORE
