In QuotedData’s morning briefing 27 May 2022:
- Worldwide Healthcare (WWH) has announced that it is terminating its placing programme, which was established on 13 July 2021, with immediate effect. WWH expects to publish its annual results later today and, if the placing programme was still in effect, this would have required WWH to publish a supplementary prospectus, which would inevitably incur a cost for WWH. WWH’s board has therefore concluded that, given the prevailing discount to NAV that the trust’s shares are currently trading at (around 5% at the time of writing), “terminating the Placing Programme is in shareholders’ best interests”. In essence, biotech and healthcare stocks appear to be suffering from a prolonged bear market, which has contributed to a widening of WWH’s discount and those of its peers and, in this environment, WWH is unlikely to be able issue any further shares, so it makes little sense to incur the cost of the supplementary prospectus. However, if the prospects for healthcare improve and the trust moves back to trading around par or at a premium, it seems probable that WWH could put a new placing programme in place.
- NextEnergy Solar Fund (NESF) has announced its scrip dividend reference price, for the quarter ended 31 March 2022, has been set at 113.5 pence per new ordinary share (this is based upon NESF’s NAV per ordinary share). The final date for receiving elections on the scrip is 7 June 2022 and the process for electing to receive scrip shares or making changes to an existing scrip dividend mandate is detailed in NESF’s scrip circular dated 12 July 2021.
- Workspace (WKP) says it will look to sell a light industrial portfolio that was acquired as part of its takeover of McKay Securities earlier this month. It says that it received several unsolicited approaches for the acquisition of the entire portfolio, last valued at £137m at 30 September 2021.
We also have the results of Gresham House Energy Storage’s and Home REIT‘s fundraise and annual results from both HarbourVest Global Private Equity (its best year ever) and WorldWide Healthcare (major underperformance).