Air Link Raises Rs. 6.43 billion in Biggest Private Sector IPO

Smartphone assembler, Air Link Communication, raised Pakistan’s single-largest investment worth Rs. 6.43 billion through selling 90 million shares to institutional and rich individual investors at the Pakistan Stock Exchange.

The company will use the raised equity to meet working capital requirements.

“This was the single-largest, historical and record-setting IPO in the private sector of Pakistan in terms of the raised equity at Rs. 6.43 billion,” the IPO consultant and book-runner JS Global CEO Kamran Nasir said.

The Air Link’s IPO was oversubscribed by 1.64 times as over 500 institutional and high net worth individual investors placed bids for 147.65 million shares against an issuance size of 90 million shares, which led to a total size of bids of around Rs. 11 billion, Nasir estimated.

The entire issue was offered through book-building at a floor price of Rs. 65 per share (including a premium of Rs. 55 per share). The general public will be offered shares on 6th and 7th September 2021 at strike price of Rs. 71.50 per share.

This was the seventh IPO of the year 2021 and the first one in the current fiscal year 2022.

In the previous fiscal year 2020-21, as many as eight companies raised a total of Rs. 20 billion through book building and an initial public offering. This was the highest number of IPOs held at PSX in 14 years.

“The company sales grew from Rs. 40 million in 2012 to over Rs. 47 billion in 2021 showing an unprecedented growth as e-commerce and digitization is expanding at a super pace in Pakistan where smartphones will become a necessity for everyone,” the brokerage house said in a commentary the other day.

The company stands as one of the largest distributors of smartphones in the country and after the announcement of the new mobile policy has set up a manufacturing facility, where they are manufacturing smartphones of the Transsion Group China. It is one of the largest distributors in Pakistan for Samsung, Apple, Huawei, Xiaomi, Intel, Techno, TCL, and Alcatel, it added.

All the big smartphone manufacturers, such as Samsung, Intel, Tencho, Infinix, TCL, and Alcatel, will now be assembled in Pakistan. Furthermore, Xiaomi, the largest smartphone manufacturer in the world, will also soon start assembling in Pakistan.

 



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