HEINEKEN: Buyback program for FEMSA completed

Heineken (32,97 EUR, -1,70%) announced it has completed the share buyback program related to the FEMSA Cerveza acquisition. In total Heineken repurchased 29,172,504 of its own shares in the market. Heineken has already delivered roughly 28.1m of these to FEMSA and the remaining shares (roughly 1.1m) will be delivered by 31 October 2011 at the latest.

Our view:
The announcement is no surprise given the stepwise execution of the sharebuyback program and the regular updates provided so far. The announcement means Heineken will have completed the deferred share payment well in advance of the maximum agreed timing (contract included possibility to deliver over a 5 year period while the acquisition was announced early January 2010).

As the shares still to be delivered were under IFRS regulations added to the outstanding shares for EPS calculation, we will finetune our model for the exact weighted average number of shares for 2011 which will be 586.3m. The impact on our EPS numbers will however be fairly negligible. We stick to our BUY rating and € 45 target price for now.