Cairo (APD) - Subscription in shares offered to retail investors in the Initial Public Offering (IPO) of Telecom Egypt (TE) was 70% oversubscribed by Monday, two days before the end of the subscription period.
The public portion of the IPO for a 20% stake in TE attracted 210,000 new investors who entered the market for the first time, Hany Serry Aldin, president of Egypt's Capital Market Authority (CMA), told the Al-Ahram daily.
He added that the bourse finished coding the total of 1.6 million investors by last Sunday, the last day for coding.
The partial privatization of state-owned fixed-line monopoly provider TE is the largest flotation in the history of the Cairo and Alexandria Exchanges (CASE), with 340 million shares being offered in a sale worth LE4.5 billion ($781million), or more.
Small investors were invited to subscribe to between 100 and 10,000 shares for a total 50% of the 340 million TE shares in the flotation. The remaining fifty percent are being offered through a private placement to institutions and high net-worth investors.
About 17 million shares from the public placement's 170 million shares have been reserved for the company's employees.
For the remaining 153 million shares offered in the public placement, prospective buyers placed orders exceeding 260 million shares, or an oversubscription by 70%, Egypt's business daily, al-Alam al-Youm, reported Tuesday.
As for the private placement, some market participants expected the offering to be 10 times oversubscribed.
The shares will start trading on the Cairo and Alexandria Stock Exchanges (CASE) on December 14. Local analysts said they would expect the shares to gain 15% on their first trading day. [TS]
By Eman Wahby, APD Staff Writer in Cairo
APD (Arab Press Digest) 2005
