China Petrochemical Corp., the country’s biggest refiner, agreed to buy Daylight Energy Ltd. for about CA$2.2 billion ($2.11 billion) in cash to add oil and gas assets in Canada.
The offer of CA$10.08 a share from China Petrochemical, known as Sinopec, is more than double Daylight’s closing price of CA$4.59 on Friday, the Calgary, Alberta-based company said Saturday in a statement.
Buying Daylight gives Sinopec access to more than 300,000 acres of land in areas rich with oil and natural gas in Canada, adding to the Chinese company’s expansion outside Asia after a slide in oil prices helped depress prices of energy stocks. Sinopec paid $4.65 billion last year to buy a stake in Syncrude Canada Ltd., while rival Cnooc Ltd. on July 20 announced it would spend $2.1 billion to acquire Opti Canada Inc.
A Sinopec gas station stands in front of a Sinopec oil refinery in Pudong district, Shanghai. (Bloomberg)
“We’ve got a confluence of a lot of adverse events in the global picture which have conspired to bring share prices down,” Michael Tims, chairman of investment bank Peters & Co. Ltd. in Calgary, said in a phone interview Sunday. “Those who have a longer time horizon may find this to be a great time.”
Daylight’s shares declined 54 percent in the past year, according to data compiled by Bloomberg, making the company an ideal takeover target for Sinopec, Tims said. More investment in Canada by international companies such as Cnooc or India’s Reliance Industries Ltd. may be imminent, he said.
Sinopec’s offer is at a 70 percent premium to Daylight’s average price over the past 20 trading days, more than double the average 32 percent premium for comparable cash bids for North American oil exploration and production companies, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.
Huang Wensheng, a spokesman for Sinopec Group and Sinopec, said he couldn’t immediately comment and the Beijing-based company is preparing a statement.
Investors feared Daylight’s relatively high debt load compared to peers, combined with a fall in oil prices, would crimp earnings, Geoff Ready, an analyst with Haywood Securities LLC in Toronto, said in a telephone interview Sunday.
“Daylight has a large inventory of relatively low risk development locations and their constraint was always capital,” said Ready, who rates Daylight “outperform” and doesn’t own shares. “That obviously disappears now.”
Sinopec’s purchase “recognizes the highly attractive asset portfolio” the company has, Daylight Chief Executive Officer Anthony Lambert said in the statement.
Asian buyers may spend $150 billion by 2016 to secure energy resources for their faster-growing economies and targets could include Tullow Oil Plc, Canadian Oil Sands Ltd. and Kosmos Energy Ltd., according to Sanford C. Bernstein Co.
Sinopec is one of 10 companies helping Enbridge Inc. pay for the regulatory approval process of the proposed Northern Gateway pipeline from Alberta’s oil sands to a British Columbia port, where tankers bound for Asian would be loaded.
Daylight Energy has oil and natural gas properties in Alberta and British Columbia. The Elmworth project in the Deep Basin area of Alberta and northeastern British Columbia contains several natural gas drilling targets. The company also owns rights adjacent to the Pembina Cardium conventional oil pool, which has produced over 1 billion barrels of oil since discovery in the 1950s. (Bloomberg)
