KUALA LUMPUR (Nov 9): The Employees Provident Fund (EPF) has increased its stake in Top Glove Corp Bhd to 6.05% or 492.52 million shares after a net acquisition of 12.9 million shares on Nov 4.
 
According to the glove maker's filing with Bursa Malaysia today, the pension fund bought the company's shares in two tranches of 12 million shares and 1.21 million shares on that day.

On the same day, the fund disposed of 304,600 Top Glove shares.

The price at which these shares changed hands was not disclosed in the filing.

Top Glove's share price closed at RM8.10 on Nov 4 — the lowest since Sept 23 when it traded at RM8.02.

Based on that price, the block of shares EPF acquired on Nov 4 is estimated at RM10.74 million.

EPF earlier purchased 6.73 million Top Glove shares on Nov 3 and another 7.56 million shares in the company on Nov 2. Cumulatively, EPF has bought 27.19 million Top Glove shares so far this month.

CGS-CIMB Research said Malaysian glove makers are the key winners in Budget 2021 due to the absence of a windfall tax.

Instead of a windfall tax, Top Glove, together with other glove players such as Hartalega Holdings Bhd, Supermax Corp Bhd and Kossan Rubber Industries Bhd, committed to contributing a collective amount of RM400 million to help combat Covid-19 in the country.

"We view this positively against a potential windfall tax as this is a one-off contribution and will not affect core earnings, whereas windfall tax would be recurring and could permanently reduce future potential earnings of glove players," CGS-CIMB said in a strategy note on Nov 7.

Top Glove recently announced that its net profit for the year ended Aug 31, 2020 leapt 412% to RM1.87 billion, from RM364.68 million for the previous year. Revenue rose 50.72% to RM7.24 billion from RM4.8 billion.

Top Glove's share price closed down two sen or 0.24% at RM8.48 today, bringing a market capitalisation of RM69.06 billion. Some 29.13 million shares were traded.

According to Bloomberg, Top Glove is covered by 22 analysts with 17 of them issuing buy calls, four issuing hold calls and one with a sell call. The 12-month consensus target price is RM10.59.