[photopress:China_Southern_air.JPG,full,alignright]The shareholders of China Southern Airlines sits shareholders have approved long-delayed reforms to its shareholding structure.
The company will offer public shareholders warrants equivalent to 1.6-for-10 bonus shares and promised that its cash dividend to all shareholders would be no less than 50% of its annual net attributable from 2007 to 2009.
The company did not say when the reforms would take effect but companies usually implement the reforms within one month after approval.
China Southern Air,the country’s largest airline by fleet size, missed a January deadline for adopting rules to make its state-held shares tradeable on the market, subjecting it to trading restrictions on the Chinese stock market.
The company said at the time that government restrictions requiring state control of key companies made it unable to reduce the state-owned shareholding, and that its parent lacked sufficient cash and other resources to compensate public shareholders for any resulting dilution to existing shares that would occur if state-owned shares became tradeable.
Regulators had set the end of 2006 as an informal deadline for companies to launch the reform, which commonly involves compensating public shareholders with bonus shares or cash for the dilution of their stakes.
China Southern reported a net loss of RMB188 million ($24.5 million) for the first quarter, down from a RMB603 million loss a year earlier, after having just edged into the black for 2006.
Source: Reuters
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