Plaza Centres plc and AX Real Estate plc are asking shareholders to approve share buyback programmes in a bid to increase liquidity in the secondary market.

In corporate updates released over the last days, the listed firms set out the terms of their initiatives, to be approved at upcoming shareholder meetings.

Plaza Centres proposal

Plaza Centres announced an EGM on 25th March, where shareholders will decide whether to authorise the company to buy back its shares for a period of 18 months. The company would be able to repurchase up to 2.4 million shares at a minimum price of €0.75 and a maximum price of €0.95 per share.

This would indicate a minimum spend of €1.8 million and a maximum spend of €2.28 million.

The repurchased shares would be cancelled.

Other resolutions to be decided during the Plaza Centres EGM is a reduction in the size of the Board of Directors and a bonus share issue.

Plaza Centres’ share price gained 15.4 per cent after the announcement, rising from €0.78 to €0.90 per share.

The move comes shortly after the Luxembourg-based Virgata Group became the largest single shareholder in Plaza Centres plc, adding a 31.4 per cent stake bought from MAPFRE MSV Life to its previous 6.2 per cent holding.

Jordi Goetstouwers Odena, Founder of Virgata Group, tells WhosWho.mt that the share buyback programme is intended to support the share price and return excess liquidity to shareholders.

“Our initiative clearly benefits all shareholders. The intention is to streamline the Board to equip the company for growth, inject a new dynamic to the way the company manages its balance sheet, and offer small shareholders who wish to exit liquidity without being at the mercy of opportunistic low offers in the market.

“For the shareholders who continue to support the company – as we do – these moves should narrow of the discount between the true value of the business and the stock market value.”

AX Real Estate proposal

Meanwhile, AX Real Estate will be putting the resolution to a vote at its upcoming AGM on 24th April.

Providing an update to an exercise examining the possibility of appointing a market market, the company said it instead opted to propose a share buyback programme, with “the primary objective to provide [...] an additional capital management tool, to support efforts towards increasing the liquidity of ordinary shares.”

The resolution to be put to shareholder vote would allocate €1 million from retained profits towards the purchase of shares, for a period of one year.

AX Real Estate would be bound to a daily acquisition limit of 25,000 shared from any single shareholder, while the maximum price payable for each share is not to exceed the company’s net asset value per share, as indicated in the last available financial statements.

AX Real Estate’s NAV stands at €151.7 million. With some 274.3 million shares in issue, the NAV per share stands at around €0.55.

The repurchased shares would be held for resale or for other permissable uses.

Market context

Plaza Centres and AX Real Estate will be following in the footsteps of M&Z, Malta International Airport and BOV, which have ongoing buyback programmes.

The increasing use of such initiatives comes at a time when trading in Maltese equities is in something of a slump, with the total transacted value in 2025 around half that of 2019.

Equity issuers, as well as activist market participants, believe such programmes can prop up companies’ share prices while offering small shareholders an exit from their positions at fair value prices.