Content area
Full Text
Graphics (Statistics) - Financial highlights of the Equine Group.; Kuala Lumpur Industries Holdings is again in distress. In trots a white knight on his trusty Equine Group mount.
LONG-TIME shareholders of Kuala Lumpur Industries Holdings Bhd (KLIH) must
be a patient lot. They have seen their investment go from more than RM4 a
share in the first half of 1997 to a meagre RM0.495 in June 1998,
following which the counter was suspended.
And the company has remained in such dire straits for more than four and
a half years since, as shareholders wait and wait.
Perhaps, for old timers, there might be a tingling sense of deja vu.
After all, the Kuala Lumpur Stock Exchange (KLSE) main board company, then
known as Kuala Lumpur Industries Bhd, went through a similar predicament
in the late-1980s (see sidebar on KLIH's history).
Help, then, came in the form of a reverse takeover (RTO) in 1991 by the
Bee Hin Group, a family-owned entity headed by Tan Sri Teong Teck Leng.
The media and industry observers hailed the move as KLIH's second lease of
life. `The company was on the verge of sinking into oblivion until it was
saved by a restructuring scheme orchestrated by the Teong family,' read a
news report.
However, Teong, the KLIH Group and its ambitious plans were rudely
brought down less than a decade later, by the 1997 Asian financial crisis.
When the storm subsided, KLIH was left with a gaping deficit in its
shareholders' funds and mounting debts, suffering a string of after-tax
losses of RM361.6 million, RM60.3 million and RM121.2 million for the
financial years (FY) ended March 31, 1998, 1999 and 2000, respectively.
In June 2000, the company was placed under special administrators by
Pengurusan Danaharta Nasional Bhd. As of Sept 30, 2002, KLIH's negative
shareholders' funds were in the region of RM465 million, while short-term
borrowings totalled RM406 million.
Despite the dismal state of things, all is not lost. This time around,
to extricate KLIH from its predicament comes white knight Taman Equine (M)
Sdn Bhd, with Datuk Patrick Lim Soo Kit at the helm. The restructuring
scheme, announced on Dec 6, 2001 and approved by the Securities Commission
(SC) on Sept 20, 2002, will effectively see an...