MANILA, Philippines — The Securities and Exchange Commission has approved the registration of the shares of technology firm Touch Solutions Inc. to pave the way for its planned P99 million initial public offering.

Touch Solutions is aiming to have its shares listed at the Second Board of the Philippine Stock Exchange. It has tapped Abacus Capital & Investment Corporation to be the issue manager and underwriter.

SEC documents show, Touch Solutions is planning to offer 22 million new common shares at a price of up to P4.50 per share in the domestic market. The maximum offer price represents a price to earnings ratio of 13.94 times 2012 earnings.

The offer price will be set on November 9, 2011 while the period is slated for November 21 to November 28, 2011. It is expected that the offer shares will be listed at the PSE on December 9, 2011.

The offer shares represent 39.5 percent of the firm’s 5.75 million outstanding shares after the IPO.

The firm is currently being controlled by Anson Uy who owns shares equivalent to 55.68 percent of its outstanding capital. This will be diluted to 33.71 percent of Touch Solutions’ post-IPO capital.

Proceeds of the offering will be used by Touch Solutions in the fourth quarter of 2011 to fund its regional expansion program (up to P67.53 million), research and development (P10 million), the construction of an educational facility (P9 million), and the purchase of affiliate Sagesoft Solutions Inc. shares (P1.76 million).

The balance of the proceeds amounting to up to P2.06 million will be used by Touch Solutions for its working capital in the first quarter of 2012.

Touch Solutions was organized in November 2001 with the main objective of providing end-to-end information and communications technology solutions and services to its customers.

In January 2002, Touch Solutions started commercial operations offering and distributing accounting software in the country but, by 2003, it started to focus on open source and open systems technologies and opted to spin off its accounting software packages to Sagesoft in 2004.