4 October 2024
(Reuters news alert)
Springer Nature‘s shares opened at 24 euros in its Frankfurt initial public offering (IPO) on Friday, 6.7% above where Germany’s first listing in six months was priced.
Shares in the publisher of Nature and Scientific American were priced at 22.5 euros earlier this week, giving it a valuation of around 4.5 billion euros ($4.96 billion).
The shares rose as much as 9.6% from their IPO price to an intraday high of 24.66 euros, outperforming Germany’s blue-chip DAX index which was trading flat and a basket of European media companies which was last 0.4% lower.
CEO Frank Vrancken Peeters said his company had named the IPO project Skywalker, after the character in the Star Wars movies. “When the Force is with you, how can you not succeed?” he said ahead of trading at the Frankfurt Stock Exchange.
The company and its bankers set a price range of 21 euros to 23.50 euros per share for the IPO last week, implying a market capitalisation of up to 4.7 billion euros.
IPO order books were covered some 30 minutes after opening.
The publisher raised 200 million euros from the sale of new shares. The total offer size was set to be around 600 million euros, assuming the full exercise of a greenshoe option.