Mandarin Oriental Shareholders Approve $4.2B Buyout by Jardines

Mandarin Oriental shareholders have overwhelmingly approved a proposal for Jardine Matheson to acquire the remaining 11.96 percent of equity in the luxury hotel operator not yet owned by the parent group.

The vote took place Monday and clears the way for a buyout valuing SGX-listed, Hong Kong-headquartered Mandarin Oriental at $4.2 billion on an equity basis, to be financed through cash on the Jardines balance sheet and committed facilities from lenders.

“Mandarin Oriental and Jardine Matheson are pleased to announce that, at the court meeting and special general meeting held earlier today in connection with the acquisition, all resolutions proposed were duly passed,” the companies said in a filing with the Singapore Exchange.

At the court-ordered meeting, the number of votes by independent shareholders in favour of the deal totalled 76.96 million, versus 188,924 votes opposed. Hong Kong-based Jardines has said it plans to delist Mandarin Oriental from the SGX.

Causeway Bay Sale Looms

The offer price of $3.35 per Mandarin Oriental share represents a more than 52 percent premium to the stock’s closing price of $2.20 on 29 September, the day before the hotelier disclosed that it was considering the sale of its interest in the One Causeway Bay commercial tower in Hong Kong.

On 17 October, Mandarin Oriental announced that Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba and its Ant financial affiliate had agreed to buy the top 13 floors of One Causeway Bay for $925 million in Hong Kong’s biggest real estate deal of 2025.

The strata title buy will give Alibaba and Ant possession of 301,555 square feet (28,015 square metres) of total floor area at One Causeway Bay — translating to $3,067 per square foot of space at the agreed price — with Mandarin Oriental retaining ownership of 286,984 square feet of office space and 82,550 square feet of retail space.

The disposal property represented 36 percent of the total value of Mandarin Oriental’s tangible fixed assets and investment properties as of the end of June, according to the company.

The deal is expected to close on 31 December and would place Jardines units as sellers in Hong Kong’s two largest office transactions of 2025, after Hongkong Land sold a set of floors in the Exchange Square complex in Central for HK$6.3 million in April.

Hotel Performance Up

In a management update last month, Jardines said Mandarin Oriental saw slightly higher third-quarter net profit compared with a year earlier, benefiting from increased revenue per available room in all regions except Southeast Asia, with particularly robust growth in the Mideast and America.

Jardines as a group kept its profit guidance for 2025 unchanged from at the half-year mark, when it reported a 45 percent year-on-year jump in six-month underlying profit to $798 million and an attributable profit of $528 million, reversing a year-earlier loss of $40 million.

Full-year results are expected to be broadly in line with last year, when Jardines posted flat revenue, an 11 percent dip in underlying profit to $1.47 billion and an attributable loss of $468 million, swinging from a profit of $686 million.

The nearly 200-year-old conglomerate controlled by the Keswick family is in the midst of a strategic shift that has seen the hiring of outside leaders including Mapletree veteran Michael Smith, who joined Hongkong Land as CEO last year, and PAG partner Lincoln Pan, who took over as Jardines CEO on 1 December.