Bankers dust off IPO candidates as Redox debuts on ASX
ECM teams, warm up your engines. The IPO market may be creaking open after 18 months – depending on how Redox ends its first day of trading.
ASX’s bell should start ringing more frequently soon as bankers and investors hope for Redox to reopen the frozen IPO market. Louie Douvis
At Street Talk’s count, bankers are sitting on at least three chunky billion-dollar floats that could be wheeled out before Christmas, after UBS’s $1.3 billion listing of chemical distributor Redox debuted on Monday.
Redox shares began trading at midday at $2.51 a pop or slightly lower than the $2.55 IPO offer price. By 12:13pm, they were trading at $2.49 but volumes were skinny.
Bankers would spend the next four hours glued to their screens to see how the first day of trading goes for the biggest IPO since Ventia Services’ $1.5 billion listing in November 2021 – and consequently, what it could mean for 2023’s batch of ASX-aspirants.
On every investor’s radar is Bain Capital’s Virgin Australia, which is on track for a September quarter IPO bookbuild after pulling the brakes on its roadshow in April. Barrenjoey, Goldman Sachs and UBS are mandated.
Then there’s grinding media business MolyCop, whose four brokers – Goldman Sachs, Macquarie Capital and Morgan Stanley and UBS – have had fund managers on standby for invites to investor meetings in the coming weeks. Also PE-backed, MolyCop fetched $1.6 billion when American Industrial Partners acquired it in 2016.
Rounding off the top-three in the big-ticket IPO pipeline is freight forwarding business Mondiale VGL which flaunted its $100 million plus annual EBITDA to fundies in mid-June with a three-broker syndicate including Craigs Investment Partners, Jarden and UBS.
On the smaller end of the
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