Airtel Uganda’s share price so far remains unchanged from Monday’s Initial Public Offer price of 100 Uganda shillings (0.02 U.S. dollars).
Investors maintained a cautious approach to the stock whose offer was undersubscribed at 54.5 percent of the 8 billion shares floated on the market. Seemingly, even the offer of 10 shares for every 100 shares applied for by retail investors buying more than 2,500 shares during the IPO, failed to attract full subscription. The sale raised 211.43 billion Uganda shillings (56.1 million U.S. dollars)
Despite the weak demand, Chief Executive Manoj Murali said Monday’s IPO was a success that it had achieved its purpose.
“We want to share our prosperity, growth, and dividends with the local Ugandan community and this IPO helps them be part of our company and profits,” he said.
The Bharti Airtel majority-owned company offered a 20 percent stake for sale in line with Uganda’s new licensing requirement for telecom firms with a national operator’s license. 11 percent was taken up and now the company says that it is in talks with Ugandan authorities and regulators over the process of listing the remaining nine percent shares.
The listing grew the number of trading accounts in the Uganda Stock Exchange to over 100,000 from 38,000. Institutional investors – mainly the Uganda National Social Security Fund that bought 4.2 billion shares – will hold 10.55 percent of the total Airtel Uganda shares while retail investors will hold 0.34 percent.
