By Lourdes O. Pilar
Researcher
INVESTORS sold MacroAsia Corp. shares following news of the company, along with its Chinese partner China Communications Construction Co. Ltd. (CCCC), being awarded the contract to develop Sangley airport in Cavite.
A total of 24.91 million MacroAsia shares worth P272.41 million were traded from Feb. 17 to 21, data from the Philippine Stock Exchange showed.
MacroAsia shares closed at P10.02 apiece on Friday, down 9.73% from P11 a week ago. Year to date, the stock’s share price is down 40.7%.
In an e-mail, Unicapital Securities, Inc. Technical Analyst Cristopher Adrian T. San Pedro attributed MacroAsia’s stock movement last week to investors reacting to the news on the awarding of the $10-billion project by the province of Cavite to MacroAsia and CCCC.
“Unfortunately, the stock price reaction was a sell on news after the stock established a short term peak at P12.00 last February 17 to close the week at P10.02,” Mr. San Pedro said.
The province of Cavite has awarded the four-runway airport project to the Lucio C. Tan-led company and the Chinese state-run firm. MacroAsia said it received the notice of selection and award for the airport project on Feb. 14.
The four-runway project, which is double the two runways of the Ninoy Aquino International Airport (NAIA) in Metro Manila, will undergo three phases. The first phase, which costs $4 billion, includes the construction of the Sangley connector road and bridge to connect the Kawit segment of the Manila-Cavite Expressway (CAVITEx) to the international airport.
Phase one will involve the construction of the airport’s first runway, which can accommodate 25 million passengers annually. The consortium will have to buy from the Transportation department the existing Sangley Airport before it could start construction works for the first phase.
The same consortium will work on the other two phases of the project, but may involve contract renegotiations, Cavite Governor Juanito Victor C. Remulla was quoted in previous reports as saying.
The second phase, which will cost about $6 billion, involves the construction of two more runways with a yearly capacity of 75 million passengers, while the last phase is the expansion to four runways to accommodate 130 million passengers yearly.
The Cavite provincial government targets the airport to start fully operating by 2023, with partial operations to start a year earlier. The fourth runway will be opened after six years.
MacroAsia’s attributable net income stood at P858.15 million in the nine months to September 2019, 11% more than the P773.21 million in the same period in 2018.
Unicapital’s Mr. San Pedro expects the stock to consolidate between P9.85 support and P11.20 resistance in the short term. “The stock might resume its downtrend path to re-test P9.28 and P8.82 support levels if it fails to hold above P10 [this week],” he said.
For Mercantile Securities, Inc. Analyst Jeff Radley C. See: “The stock may continue to slide down and visit its next support level at P8.80. Support levels to watch are P10 and P8.80,” he said in a separate e-mail.
Mr. See placed the stock’s resistance levels at P11.20 and P12.
