MOSCOW (Reuters) – Russian forestry group Segezha debuted on the Moscow Exchange at around 8 roubles per share on Wednesday, matching its final IPO offer price and implying a market capitalisation of 125.5 billion roubles ($1.68 billion), the company said.
The offering consists of 3,750,000,000 new shares, representing 31.4% of Segezha’s current share capital, the company said, with Segezha set to raise 30 billion roubles.
Segezha, controlled by conglomerate Sistema, announced plans to hold an initial public offering earlier this month. Sistema will retain a 73.7% ownership stake, with a free float of 23.9% expected.
The final offer price, set at 8 roubles per share, was towards the lower end of a target price range of 7.75-10.25 roubles per share, set last week. By 0840 GMT, Segezha was trading just below 8 roubles per share.
The order book was two times oversubscribed, Segezha President Mikhail Shamolin told a trading ceremony at the Moscow Exchange, with around 50% of the IPO purchased by foreign institutional investors, including from Scandinavia, the United Kingdom and the United States.
A further 10% was purchased by retail investors, he added.
Russia is poised to see a surge of IPO activity this year, Swiss bank UBS said last month, after raising less than $2 billion in 2020 amid the fallout from the pandemic and sanctions fears.
Retailer Fix Price has already raised $2 billion this year via Russia’s largest IPO since 2014, when the West imposed sanctions, and online retailer Ozon staged a successful Nasdaq debut late last year.
Vladimir Chirakhov, president of Sistema, whose stake in Ozon dropped to 33.1% after the IPO, named agriculture holding company Steppe, the Medsi chain of medical clinics and pharmaceutical holding company Binnopharm as its units now best suited to an IPO, but declined to say which would be next.
($1 = 74.8975 roubles)
Reporting by Olga Popova and Alexander Marrow; editing by Louise Heavens and Barbara Lewis
