Prokom Investments, the largest shareholder of Bioton, has reported selling yesterday 7% stake in the company (13.2m shares). As a result, its share in Bioton has decreased fropm 47.4% to 40.4%. At the same time Prokom Investments stated that it does not plan to further decrease its stake in Bioton in the near future and will fully use its rights to subscribe for G series shares. Yesterday, in the block transactions, in total, it was sold 20.7m shares of Bioton at PLN 23.6 per share. It is rumored that the remaining 7.5m could have been sold by Nihonswi, the fund associated with Prokom Investments. Should this be true, Nihonswi’s share in Bioton would decrease from 13.9% to 9.7%.
Our view: We believe that yesterday's situation closely resembles the situation in Prokom from two years ago. In case of Prokom similar behaviour of the biggest shareholder coupled with other corporate governance issues, triggered a sell-off of Prokom. Yesterday, Bioton's share price fell 9.5%. We believe that on the back of yesterday's transactions the so far very good sentiment to Bioton could worsen.