Director of Equity Financing, FINAM Investment Company, Moscow
Photo by: Vladimir Kuznetsov
Last weekend I took a nice stroll around rainy Moscow and noticed a new addition to the local landscape (see the photo above taken on Saturday, August 4, 2007). The ad says: “Every company has the right to IPO”. Now, definitely something has changed in the minds of our financial consulting firms!
This ad was placed by the Otkritie Financial Corporation, which is nowhere near the top-ranked IPO underwriters and managers in Russia. However, the corporation has an extremely qualified Board of Directors that includes several prominent Russian businessmen.
VTB's IPO in May 2007 raised $8 billion
Anyway, all the rankings and ratings for the first half of 2007 place Russian IPOs in a very favorable global position. Of course the Sberbank (RTC:SBER), and Vneshtorbank (RTD:VTBR) IPOs were the biggest hits, but there was also a large IPO for Africa Israel Investments Inc. (TLV:AFIL). Some quality research by the ReDeal Group may be found on their website (http://www.offerings.ru) recapping H1 2007. Among other facts, it notes that 43% of Russian IPOs ranked by value were placed on the domestic stock exchanges – a definite sign of a strengthening Russian stock market
You can read the original post at Vladimir Kuznetsov's blog, Equity Financing in Russia. The views expressed in this post and on his blog are the personal opinions of Vladimir Kuznetsov, and are reproduced here solely for educational purposes. To read more Russia Blog posts about Russian capital markets, click on the finance section or type www.russiablog.org/finance in your web browser.
