Stephen Abban, Group Head – Personal Banking, Access Bank
Access Bank will officially list on the Ghana Stock Exchange (GSE) after successfully raising the minimum subscription needed to declare its Initial Public Offer (IPO) successful in order to list.
The listing, which will take place on Wednesday, 21st December, 2016, will see Access Bank becoming the first Nigerian bank to list on the GSE.
The bank on October 19th, 2016 launched its IPO to raise GH¢104 million and extended the issue from November 11 to November 25, 2016.
Stock market analysts at the time cited inappropriate timing and pricing as some reasons that led to the extension of the offer period for Access Bank’s Initial Public Offer.
“The extension was given to investors who were not able to purchase within the stipulated period. As expected for some us we were not considering the deal to be flying; also we think the timing was not enough and the pricing too, some of us think was on the high side,” Stock market analyst, Kofi Kyei stated.
The bank, whose parent company is headquartered in Nigeria, was seeking to raise GH¢104 million, but succeeded in raising only GH¢29.62 million, which is slightly higher than the minimum GH¢21 million required by regulators to enable it get the green light to list on the GSE.
26 million shares were issued at 4 cedis per share, with a total of 1,820 applications subscribing to about 7.4 million shares.
Citi Business News has gathered that the bank has received firm commitments from other investors to cover shares that were not issued under the terms of offer.
Over GH¢96 million is expected from those investors which will lead to total figure of over GH¢125 million.
Ninety percent of the subscribers are believed to be individuals, with one of the subscribers a local pension fund manager.
Access Bank Ghana, whose current capital base is around GH¢430 million, is seeking to use proceeds from the IPO to increase this figure while the remaining cash will be used to expand the bank’s presence and visibility in Ghana by building additional 76 branches within two to three years.
The bank’s IT infrastructure and customer base are also expected to be expanded with the proceeds.
-Citifmonline.com