Hipgnosis Songs Fund has a stack of fresh cash to play with.
The aggressively acquisitive UK-listed firm has announced to investors today (July 6) that is has successfully raised £156 million ($215 million) via a proposed new share placing on the London Stock Exchange.
That figure is slightly higher than the £150 million ($210m) Hipgnosis targeted with its announcement of the share placing in June. Why? Because the raise was over-subscribed, thanks to what Hipgnosis says was “significant demand from existing and new investors”.
Hipgnosis confirmed to would-be investors last month that this would be their last chance to buy into the company via a new share placing until Q2 2022 at the earliest.
Celebrating the new raise today, Hipgnosis boss and founder, Merck Mercuriadis, said: “I am once again delighted with the support from both our existing and new shareholders with an oversubscribed raise of over $215 million.
“We will deploy this immediately into our pipeline of songs and I am incredibly appreciative of the incredible songwriters who have entrusted us with their iconic works.”
Added Mercuriadis: “We will now have a portfolio of almost $2.5 billion of extraordinarily successful and culturally important songs, which offers a massive opportunity for us to add value with our Song Management [approach], which manages these songs with bandwidth and responsibility.”
“We will deploy this immediately into our pipeline of songs and I am incredibly appreciative of the incredible songwriters who have entrusted us with their iconic works.”
Hipgnosis released its latest finalized annual report this week, confirming that it had spent $1.06 billion on buying 84 music catalogs in the 12 months to end of March 2021.
At that juncture, Hipgnosis owned a total of 64,098 songs across 138 catalogs.
As a result of the new share placing, some 128,636,363 new ordinary shares in Hipgnosis have been placed to new and existing investors at a price of £1.21 pence per share.
These new shares are expected to be admitted to trading on the London Stock Exchange on the morning of July 9.
In addition to raising the new money via the share placing, Hipgnosis is also currently considering a move to deepen its acquisitive warchest via a refreshed credit facility.
The company drew down $90 million under its existing credit facility in March, resulting in gross indebtedness of $577 million and net indebtedness of $465 million.
However, in April it paid back $50 million of this draw-down amount.Music Business Worldwide