Malaysian Tycoon Lim Han Weng In Talks For A Potential Yinson Deal

Yinson Holdings said its chairman Lim Han Weng is in talks with several parties for a potential deal involving his shareholding in the Kuala Lumpur-listed energy giant.

“Given that the discussions are still at an exploratory stage, there is currently no conclusive indication that the discussions would give rise to a corporate proposal involving Yinson,” the company said in a statement to Bursa Malaysia.

While the statement didn’t identify the parties Lim is in talks with, Bloomberg reported last week that the Lim family was in exclusive talks with New York-based Stonepeak Partners to take Yinson private in a deal valuing the company at 9 billion ringgit ($2.1 billion). That’s at a 38% premium to Yinson’s market capitalization of 6.5 billion ringgit.

Yinson was founded in 1984 by Lim and his wife, Bah Kim Lian, as a transport and trading company. It has since diversified into energy infrastructure and is now one the world’s largest operators of floating production, storage and offloading (FPSO) vessels that it leases to oil and gas companies in Angola, Brazil, Ghana and Vietnam. Its FPSO vessel operating unit raised $1 billion in January from the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, British Columbia Investment Management and Singapore-based private equity firm RRJ Capital.

In 2020, Yinson diversified into renewable energy and now has solar plants in India and Peru. With a net worth of $480 million, the Lim family ranked no. 41 in Forbes Asia’s list of Malaysia’s richest that was published in April this year.