Yahoo Finance Philippines' DoubleDragon subsidiary Hotel101 Global to list in US
*
Hotel101 to be first Philippine company to list in U.S.
*
Listing to be achieved through a SPAC merger
*
Hotel101 to have equity value of over $2.3 bln
By Yantoultra Ngui and Neil Jerome Morales
SINGAPORE/MANILA, April 8 (Reuters) - Philippine real estate firm DoubleDragon on Monday said subsidiary Hotel101 Global will list on the Nasdaq in the United States via a merger with special purpose acquisition company JVSPAC Acquisition Corp.
Hotel101 Global will become the first Philippine company to list in the U.S. following the deal with the SPAC - a publicly listed shell that raises funds to merge with a private entity.
The merger is likely to result in Hotel101 having an equity value of over $2.3 billion, DoubleDragon, Hotel101 and JVSPAC said in a joint statement. It will close in the second half of the year with Hotel101 listing under ticker "HBNB".
"We believe that a NASDAQ listing will provide Hotel101 with access to public capital markets and help accelerate our global expansion plans," Hotel101 CEO Hannah Yulo-Luccini said in the statement.
Hotel101 is the hotel arm of Philippines-listed DoubleDragon, formed by tycoon Sia with Jollibee Foods owner Tony Tan Caktiong.
It builds and operates hotels with standardized, 21 square metre rooms that it sells individually to investors.
Hotel101's asset-light business model generates revenue first from room sales and then from the recurring income from day-to-day hotel operations, Yulo-Luccini said.
It is headquartered in Singapore and operates two hotels in the Philippines, with three under development in Japan, Spain and the U.S.
The firm aims to expand to 25 countries including China and Saudi Arabia by 2026, and derive 95% of revenue from overseas.
JVSPAC is led by Albert Wong, former CEO of luxury products distributor Kingsway Group - the sole distributor of Lamborghini cars in Hong Kong, Macau and Guangzhou, the statement showed.
The merger will see Hotel101 join a growing number of Southeast Asian firms to list in the U.S., filling a void left by Chinese companies that have paused such listings amid Sino-U.S. tension.
Vietnamese EV maker VinFast listed in the U.S. in August via a merger with SPAC Black Spade Acquisition. It now commands a market value of some $10 billion, LSEG data showed.
In February, the parent of Malaysian budget airline AirAsia, Capital A, finalised a deal to list its brand management unit on the Nasdaq with SPAC Aetherium Acquisition . That deal gave the unit, Capital A International, an enterprise value of $1.15 billion. (Reporting by Yantoultra Ngui in Singapore and Neil Jerome Morales in Manila; Editing by Christopher Cushing)
