Companies queuing up for WSE debut

In recent months, private companies have definitely changed their attitude to their debut on the Warsaw Stock Exchange and brokerage houses are currently talking about a queue of people willing to conduct a public offering of shares, according to the discussion at the Conference of the Chamber of Brokerage Houses.

"Over the past few months, after several very attractive public debuts, we have a queue of people willing to enter the stock exchange. We are working very intensively on new prospects, including very interesting technology companies," Maciej Jacenko, CEO of Pekao Investment Banking, said.

"It is possible that we will carry out several public offerings in the first half of the year. I hope that the second half of the year will not be worse. We are getting signals that other brokerage houses are also preparing to carry out offers," Grzegorz Zawada, BM PKO BP director, added.

The interest of companies in the stock exchange began after Allegro conducted the largest IPO in the history of the WSE in the second half of last year. Its value exceeded PLN 9 billion. Institutional investors in the first hour of book building made declarations to buy all offered shares at the maximum price of another e-commerce company, Dadelo. Huuuge Inc., a representative of the gaming sector, also carried out a large and successful public offering at the beginning of this year, although after its debut, the company recorded a significant drop in the share price, which somewhat dampened the enthusiasm of investors.

Paradoxically, the debut of Inpost, which chose the Amsterdam market, but conducted one of the largest IPOs in the history of technology companies in Europe, was an incentive to consider entering the WSE.

"Until recently, the Polish capital market would not be the top of their dreams for them and the reasons for this were clear: liquidity, valuations, investors' reluctance to invest in technologies. The situation over the last 12 months has changed dramatically," Bartłomiej Gola, general partner at SpeedUp Venture Capital Group, said.

(PAP)