Telekom Malaysia's Sri Lankan mobile unit launched the island's biggest IPO on July 07, with managers to the issue saying the overbid sale would raise around $85 million and would close the same day. Investors had oversubscribed the issue of Sri Lanka's top mobile operator, Dialog Telekom, nearly three-fold at the offer's ceiling price of 12 rupees a share by the formal opening of subscription, said issue manager Sanjeewa Karunatilake.
Dialog Telekom, which commands 60 percent of the local mobile market, plans to use the sale proceeds to expand its network infrastructure and traffic handling capacity, aimed at adding 500,000 customers to its 1.5 million subscriber base. "It has opened and we will be sending out in a few hours' time notification of oversubscription," said Karunatilake, who works for investment bank NDB in Colombo.
"Right now, it's close to three times (oversubscribed). It could well go up to four-plus," he told Reuters. "It will definitely close today."
Dialog Telekom aims to issue just under 10 percent of the company to start trading on the Colombo Stock Exchange on July 28, though Karunatilake said the issue could start trading in the first week of August pending the share allocation process. The company will list 712.3 million ordinary shares. The offer was priced in a range of eight to 12 rupees a share.
Fully subscribed at the upper price, the issue will raise 8.55 billion rupees ($85.5 million) and will top the $36 million raised by the sale of 25 percent of Indian Oil Corp's Lanka IOC unit as the bourse's biggest IPO.
Comments
Comments are closed.