Chinwendu Obienyi
The Nigerian Stock Exchange (NSE) has said that the planned cross border secondary listing of 3,758,151,504 ordinary shares of Airtel Africa Plc. (Company) has been postponed.
NSE had on Thursday, assured the investing public that all was set for yesterday’s proposed dual/cross border listing of its entire issued 3,758,151,504 ordinary shares of Airtel Africa Plc on its main board.
But in a statement sent to Saturday Sun, the NSE, said, the postponement was necessitated by the need to ensure that the telcommunications company meets all the post NSE approval pre-requisites for listing on the exchange.
Speaking during the com- pany’s “Facts before listing” in Lagos on Friday, Chief Executive Officer, NSE, Oscar Onyema, while congratulating the Board and Management of Airtel Africa on its successful global capital raise of $750m via Initial Public Offering (IPO) by way of book building and its secondary listing on the exchange, revealed that the listing would be done in appropriate manner.
“We would advise ap- propriately when the listing can happen and this market is a highly regulated market as one need to have pieces of information and there are processes at the background that needs to happen before we are ready to list and trade airtel shares”
According to him, the list- ing will deepen the telecoms and technology sector for investors and provide an op- portunity for a wider group of Nigerians to be part of the African telecoms growth story.
“This listing is a promising development in Africa with Airtel Africa being the second company to have its ordinary shares listed on both the London Stock Exchange and the Nigerian Stock Exchange. This gives credence to the successful partnership between the two exchanges and we encourage similarly situated com- panies to explore the different opportunities for raising capital on the Exchange’s platform. Furthermore, it shows the confidence Airtel Africa has in our platform, which has a total market capitalization of N25.20Tn across various asset classes.
“Airtel Africa’s listing on the NSE will not only showcase the company as an established player in the African telecommunication industry, but will enable the firm to actualize its strategic vision to enrich the lives of customers”.
Corroborating him, Man- aging Director, Airtel Nigeria, Segun Ogunsanya, said, “We just have some proce- dural papers that we ought to complete, the processes are in place and one or two things should be completed before the end of today and so once it is completed, then we will go ahead to list on the NSE.”
The shares of Airtel Africa with operations in 14 African countries are to be listed at N363 per share, adding a total of N1.364 trillion to the market capitalization of the NSE.
The secondary listing of Airtel on the NSE is coming after its London Stock Exchange (LSE) primary listing on Wednesday, which followed a book building process that saw investors purchasing 637,178,979 ordinary shares of 50 Cents at 80 Pence per share.
A secondary listing is when securities already listed on a primary exchange are subsequently listed on other securities exchanges, with the issuer not subjected to the full requirements applicable to listing on the other securities exchange(s) at which it seeks a secondary listing.
Meanwhile, a book build is defined as “a price discovery mechanism that is used in the capital market to price securities for public sale for the first time. When shares are being offered for sale in an IPO, it can either be done at a fixed price or at a price range. If the company is not sure about the exact price at which to market its shares, it can decide a price range instead of an exact figure. The price range sets a floor price and the highest price in which investors can bid.”
A total of $750m was raised from the exercise, with Nigerian participants contributing just under N15bn from 39,227,968 shares pur- chased at N363 each.