Hanwha Solutions CI
Hanwha Solutions (009830.KS) said Thursday it held a board meeting and approved a revised plan to reduce its rights offering to 1.7 trillion won from 1.8 trillion won, submitting a voluntary correction filing to the Financial Supervisory Service (FSS). The number of new shares to be issued will fall 5.4% to 5.3 million from 5.6 million, with the planned issue price lowered to 32,250 won from 32,400 won.
The latest revision comes 37 days after the first amendment on the 20th of last month, and two months after the company abruptly announced its initial 2.4 trillion won rights offering plan on March 26.
With this adjustment, the amount earmarked for debt repayment has been further reduced by 100 billion won to 800 billion won, after being trimmed from an initial 1.5 trillion won to 900 billion won. By contrast, the company’s growth investment plans for future innovation, totaling 900 billion won — including a perovskite tandem pilot line upgrade (100 billion won) and the build-out of a tandem mass-production line and expansion of TOPCon production capacity (800 billion won) — remain unchanged.
The shortfall created by the additional 100 billion won reduction in the rights offering will be covered through the sale of a U.S. venture capital fund. Since 2022, Hanwha Solutions had invested in the fund through a subsidiary to monitor market and technology trends in future industries such as North American energy and the circular economy and to explore preemptive business opportunities.
Hanwha Solutions said it had not previously considered selling the fund as a short-term external liquidation measure given its nature as a long-term investment asset aimed at discovering innovative companies, but reassessed its use as part of additional self-help measures. The company explained that, in addition to existing non-core asset sales, it expanded the scope of liquidation candidates to include assets that are related to its core businesses but have limited impact on medium- to long-term profitability and a high likelihood of being sold within a short period.
Hanwha Solutions emphasized that the further reduction in the rights offering size was decided to better accommodate shareholder and market demands that continued after the second amendment to the securities registration statement, and to ease the burden on minority shareholders participating in the offering, even if only slightly. As a result, the capital increase ratio fell to about 30% from about 32%, and the number of shares allocated per existing share decreased to 0.2465 from approximately 0.2605.
The latest amendment also includes additional information to help investors’ understanding, such as supplementary disclosures on investment risk factors and details of legal reviews conducted during the decision-making process.
“We take seriously the fact that we have not fully met shareholder expectations during this rights offering process,” said Nam Jung-woon, head of Hanwha Solutions’ Chemical Division, and Park Seung-deok, head of the Qcells Division. “Improving our financial structure and investing in growth are tasks that can no longer be delayed, and we will do our best to resolve the market undervaluation and enhance shareholder value.”