Westfield's Lowy bids farewell to ASX as OneMarket bows out
Steven Lowy has made his last speech as the head of a publicly listed company as he presided over the delisting of his OneMarket retail data business from the Australian Securities Exchange.
OneMarket was listed in mid-2018 as a spin-off from the Westfield retail empire which Mr Lowy co-ran with his father Sir Frank Lowy and brothers Peter and David Lowy until it was sold in late 2017 for $32 billion to Unibail-Rodamco.
On Monday, after failing to find a buyer or a potential merger partner, the business was officially wound up.
In its first year of listing, OneMarket, which was born out of the Westfield Labs business, churned through about $180 million of cash. It lost vital contracts with retail clients, including US department store chain Nordstrom, and struggled to attract investors because many viewed it as a startup.
Speaking at the company’s final meeting in Sydney on Monday, Mr Lowy said OneMarket was listed as an early-stage technology startup, with the higher risk profile typically associated with such ventures.
“OneMarket is still some way from generating substantial revenue and in the meantime is incurring significant operating losses on a monthly basis. Those operating losses have materially reduced the cash reserves which were available to OneMarket at the time of listing.”
OneMarket entered the bourse at $1.53, then fell to 57 cents before rising back to 97c at the time of its delisting.
As part of the wind-up process, OneMarket’s creditors will be paid in full and the remaining funds will be distributed to shareholders in three to four months as an interim distribution, “in the range of 88c to 94c per share”.
Investors will have to wait for “two to three years” for a final payment, which could be as much as 15c per share.
The Lowy family own 5 per cent of the business and Unibail-Rodamco-Westfield has 4.9 per cent. The largest shareholder is Samuel Terry Asset Management, which holds a 15 per cent stake in the company.
OneMarket’s wind-up comes after the Lowy family sold its $815 million stake in the listed Scentre Group in October. Scentre is the manager and owner of Westfield malls in Australia and New Zealand.
