Traders in the stock market expected the IPO of the e-payment network Fawry to be 4x oversubscribed until Monday trading session in the Egyptian Exchange (EGX), taking into consideration the traditional large turnout of investors on big offerings in their last two sessions, which may lead to more demand. Until last Thursday's session, 35.36m shares in the public offering were 1.8x oversubscribed in the fifth IPO session, after 324 orders were issued with a total of 64.5m shares. The Fawry IPO will close tomorrow, and the EGX will start trading the shares for only a single session, on Thursday, as the following week will see the Eid Al-Adha holiday. Last week, the institutional offering of Fawry was 15.9x oversubscribed at EGP 6.46 per share (offer price), having generated about EGP 7.1bn ($431.0m), the offering manager EFG Hermes announced. The offering included 36% stake, which represents 21% of its capital, distributed as follows: 149,948,474 shares to Actis, National Bank of Egypt, and Banque Misr (representing 21.2% of Fawry's share capital), (the cornerstone offering); 69,315,803 shares to qualified institutional and high net worth investors (representing 9.8% of Fawry's share capital), (the institutional offering); and 35,365,206 shares to retail investors (representing 5.0% of Fawry's share capital) (the Retail Offering, and together, the combined offering). Hermes said that the ownership of indirect shareholders through Payments Solutions will be transferred into direct ownership after trading on the shares begin, while freezing 51% of their shares for two years. A request shall be made to the Financial Regulatory Authority to exclude the main shareholders from making a mandatory purchase offer in the transfer of ownership.
