Nepi Rockcastle, which owns premier shopping centres in Central and Eastern Europe, has raised €300m for its development and acquisition pipeline and for replenishing funds to use opportunistically, it said on Friday.
The capital raise comprised the issue of 41.72-million new ordinary shares with a nominal value of €0.01 each, representing about 6.2% of the company’s existing issued ordinary share capital.
The offer price of R137.85 (€7.191) represents a discount of about 4.36% to the closing share price of R144.13 on October 17 and a discount of about 4.98% to the weighted average price of R145.08 on the JSE over the 30 trading days before October 18, it said.
Citigroup Global Markets Europe and HSBC Continental Europe acted as joint global coordinators and joint bookrunners, together with Erste Group Bank, ING Bank and Societe Generale who acted as joint bookrunners, and Java Capital, who advised the company on the placing.
In a separate statement, Fortress Real Estate Investments said to maintain its current shareholding in and to provide support to its associate Nepi Rockcastle, it has acquired an additional 13.9-million Nepi shares for about R1.9bn through its participation in the bookbuild. The purchase will be executed by way of an off-market trade on October 23, it said.
After the acquisition, Fortress will hold 121.88-million Nepi Rockcastle shares, representing 17.11% of the total shares in issue.
In September Nepi issued a green €500m unsecured long seven-year Eurobond maturing in January 2032, issued through its subsidiary NE Property, carries a 4.25% fixed coupon, with an issue price of 99.124%.
The group said at the time that demand for its green corporate bond book build was “very strong,” with an oversubscribed book that peaked over €3bn. It said the proceeds would be used to finance or refinance eligible green projects.
The joint lead managers on this bond issue were Deutsche Bank, Raiffeisen Bank International, SMBC, Societe Generale and UniCredit.
Earlier in September, Nepi Rockcastle said it was in negotiations to acquire another shopping centre in Poland.
The group, which owns, develops and manages shopping centres in various countries, including Romania, Poland, Slovakia, Bulgaria, Hungary, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Serbia and Lithuania, said it was in talks to acquire Magnolia Park, a shopping centre in Wroclaw.
Nepi already holds several assets in Poland, including the Atrium Copernicus Shopping Centre in Toruń, which it acquired in November 2022, and Forum Gdańsk, which it bought in December 2022.
The JSE-listed company acts as a rand hedge for SA investors seeking exposure to European commercial real estate. It is valued at R95bn on the JSE.
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