Banks on SSP flotation hope the price will come in high June 30, 2014 BANKERS on the £1bn plus flotation of the food concessions group SSP said last night they were confident of getting the issue away at a healthy price. Books were covered on the full deal size late on Friday, the day it launched bookbuilding. The business is targeting £490m–£570m, with books closing around July 9. Goldman [...]
Liberty Living pulls London IPO due to market concerns June 26, 2014 Liberty Living has scrapped its plans for a listing on London’s main market less than a month after announcing its intentions, citing adverse market conditions. Liberty is a brand of the Dublin-listed student property fund Brandeaux, which was forced to suspend its shares last summer after it was overwhelmed by redemption requests by investors. “This [...]
Has David Cameron been damaged politically by the conviction of Andy Coulson? June 25, 2014 Ben Harris-Quinney, director of Conservative Grassroots, says Yes. The phone hacking saga is still unfolding, but it is unlikely that the verdict on David Cameron’s hiring of former News of the World editor Andy Coulson as director of communications at Number 10 will change. The whole episode puts a question mark over the Prime [...]
Google Play: 4 charts showing growth in app downloads, revenue, gaming and markets June 24, 2014 Google Play, the app store available on smartphones by Samsung and HTC, more than doubled revenue from app downloads driven by the ever-growing popularity of gaming. Almost 90 per cent of Google Play revenue comes from games typified by the hugely popular Candy Crush Saga and Clash of Clans, up from 80 per cent in [...]
Private equity under fire as floats plunge June 23, 2014 PRIVATE equity is under renewed scrutiny from buyside investors after two floats backed by Europe’s biggest buyout houses slumped in market trading yesterday. Shares in holiday website eDreams Odigeo plunged more than a third just eight weeks after Permira and Ardian sold part of their stake. The group, which became the first stock market listing [...]
Inside Track: Banks in clover as new issues continue to defy critics June 19, 2014 Far from being on its uppers as some of the moodier fund managers have predicted, London’s new issues market continues to show resilience as we come up to the half-way point in the year. Mid-June is when the City’s big investment bank houses conduct their mid-year reviews and on the whole they make for positive [...]
Volution loses ground after share sale debut June 18, 2014 THE BRITISH engineering firm hailed by David Cameron earlier this year fell on its stock market debut yesterday, joining the ranks of companies to dip on their first trading day. Volution Group, which owns flagship ventilation engineering group Vent-Axia, closed down three per cent at 145p. Shares were priced at 150p. Numerous London floats have [...]
Bottom Line: Slow and steady wins this race to market June 16, 2014 ONE NEEDS to look no further than the World Cup for a reminder of how people love to swing from one extreme to the other. An embarrassing 5-1 defeat to the Netherlands, for example, and suddenly Spain – the current World Cup holders and winners of the last two European Championships – are deemed to be [...]
City ignores critics with rush to float June 16, 2014 LONDON’S fragile new issues market will shrug off the fears of sceptical fund managers this week as two of the country’s biggest employers pull the trigger on multi-billion pound listings. FTSE giant Lloyds Banking Group is expected to lift the bottom level of the price range for the listing of high street offshoot TSB, while [...]
Inside Track: United banking syndicate does a sound job for B&M June 12, 2014 Given that one of the City’s star fund managers said less than three weeks ago that the Saga flotation had “probably killed” the market for further new issues, bankers were mightily relieved yesterday that shares in B&M immediately ticked up nicely in first day trading for the discount retailing group’s shares. So frayed were nerves [...]