Nearly 72% of shareholders in Schroders Capital Global Innovation (INOV) tried to sell their shares in the company’s latest tender offer, demonstrating their interest in seeing the former Woodford Patient Capital Trust wind down and return their capital.
The £107m company said it had received applications to sell from 71.97% of shares, a significant oversubscription that doesn’t alter its plan to buy back 19.6% of the shares.
The high demand was not surprising as INOV is buying back the shares at 22.3p compared to their current price of 16.5p.
The tender offer returns £28m to shareholders, an increase from the original £20m announced in May. It was originally meant to occur in June, using proceeds from disposals such as the £6.5m sale of Bluewater Bio to Salica Environmental Technologies Fund in January.
However, pricing the transaction in the middle of the reporting season proved difficult so the return of capital was delayed until after the half-year results this month.
These showed net asset value per share rose 1.3% to 22.53p in the six months to 30 June 2026. That puts the shares on a 26% discount,
This is the second tender offer since shareholders voted to wind down the company in February 2025. Three months later INOV returned £37m in a share buyback that was also oversubscribed.
Our view
David Batchelor, senior analyst at QuotedData, said: “It is no surprise that INOV’s tender has been heavily oversubscribed. With the shares trading at a substantial discount, shareholders were always likely to take the opportunity to realise some of their investment at close to NAV. More encouraging is that positive cash generation from the portfolio allowed the amount being returned to rise from the £20m originally proposed to £28m. The challenge from here is that, as the wind-down progresses, the remaining portfolio will become smaller and increasingly concentrated in the harder-to-realise assets. The pace and value of those eventual realisations will determine how much value is ultimately recovered for shareholders.”
