Reminds me of 2006 all over again.......
Oct 16, 2010
Demand hot for Global Logistic IPO
96% of retail investors who applied allocated shares by ballot
By Gabriel Chen
ONE of Singapore's biggest ever public share floats has attracted huge interest from small investors, with over $2.2 billion chasing the shares worth $200 million reserved for retail investors.
The red-hot response to the initial public offering (IPO) for Global Logistic Properties (GLP) sets up a sizzling trading debut for the counter on the Singapore Exchange (SGX) on Monday.
The lion's share of this IPO went to institutional players and other larger investors, but 102 million shares were made available to retail investors.
At $1.96 a pop, when applications closed on Thursday, 88,393 retail investors had put in an application. Of this number, practically all investors got a bite of the cherry with a 96 per cent success rate, GLP said last night.
But even the successful ones had to ballot for their shares and they got far fewer than what they were hoping for. For those who applied for between one and 19 lots, they were allocated only one lot or 1,000 shares. Those who applied for between 20 and 49 lots got only two lots. And for those who opted for 50 to 99 lots, a paltry three lots was the result.
Many retail investors went to the ATMs yesterday evening to check if their money had been refunded into their bank accounts since they will not officially be informed until next week.
A disappointed Mr C.P. Tan found that he had ended up empty-handed even though he had applied for 10 lots.
'If it rose a lot on the first day of trading, I would have sold it,' he said.
Before the offer had closed, market watchers had expected a strong response. 'We had a lot of inquiries from our clients on this issue and there was generally good demand,' said Mr Loh Hoon Sun, managing director of Phillip Securities.
Mr Ding Hock Chai, Kim Eng's co-head of corporate finance, added: 'As laymen say, very hot, very hot.'
With a subscription rate of 11 times for the retail part of the offer, GLP gained a stronger response compared with the previous large IPO in November last year, when CapitaMalls Asia received just under $1 billion worth of retail money for about $200 million worth of shares, giving that a five times subscription rate.
With an overall subscription rate of 12 times for the entire IPO, market observers said that this was a well-received offer, given the huge size of the listing.
Investors said that they want a slice of GLP because it is a major player in the fast-growing modern logistics facilities market in China and Japan.
And with banks offering unappealing rock-bottom deposit rates, GLP is extremely attractive given that it is a unit of the Government of Singapore Investment Corporation (GIC) with a strong potential for capital returns.
Investors said they are aware GLP does not guarantee dividends, but that GLP shares still appeal to them anyway.
'Well, it's a government-linked IPO, so I feel that the opportunity for price appreciation is very strong,' said Mr M. Mohan, a 45-year-old real estate agent.
GLP states in its prospectus that 'we cannot assure you that our company will declare or pay any dividends'.
Parties who invested in GLP include China's National Council for Social Security Fund, e-commerce firm Alibaba Group, and Singapore's former 'remisier king' Peter Lim who has been in the news for his bid to buy Liverpool Football Club.
NetResearch Asia's executive chairman Kevin Scully expects the stock to rise by about 5 per cent to 10 per cent on Monday when trading starts, and then to stay at that level for the first month. This means GLP could jump to as high as $2.15 on its debut.
'How it performs after that will be based on fundamentals and market sentiment,' Mr Scully said.
GLP's prospectus highlights potential downsides from the concentration of all its assets in China and Japan.
GLP's IPO hits the market within days of another mega IPO, that of Temasek Holdings-linked Mapletree Industrial Trust's IPO, which begins trading next Thursday.
'The IPO fever has just staged a comeback. It's still early stages and there is much more to come,' said APS chief investment officer Wong Kok Hoi.
GLP is Singapore's largest IPO since SingTel went public in 1993 and will be among the top 30 SGX listed companies by market value after it lists.
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