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| Global Ports | |
| Value | $587.5 million IPO |
| Global coordinators | Deutsche Bank, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Troika Dialog |
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If leveraged loan transactions were falling by the wayside, however, it was nothing compared with the carnage in equity markets. Even the Polish government, renowned for two years of wildly successful privatizations, was forced to cancel a planned Z7 billion secondary offering of leading bank PKO BP, while the tally of pulled Russian deals quickly ran into double figures.
Nord Gold, Koks and Chelpipe were among the early casualties, brought down by a combination of adverse external conditions and the continuing stand-off between global investors and Russian shareholders over the value of the latter’s assets – and although the $3.3 billion SPO of VTB made it to market, a long-awaited offering of 7.6% of Sberbank scheduled for September was one of several promised Russian privatizations that never saw the light of day.
Again, this threw into flattering relief the deals that did make it through – although the year’s biggest IPO, the $1.435 billion listing of internet company Yandex in New York, owed its appeal to the insatiable appetite of global technology investors rather than its Russian equity credentials. By contrast, the success of more modest offerings from Nomos Bank and Global Ports, which priced London listings in April and June respectively, constituted both an accurate reflection of buyers’ interest in the Russian growth story and a resounding endorsement of their owners’ commitment to transparency and sound corporate governance.
Of the two, the $587.5 million listing of 25% of Global Ports gets the nod for the sheer gutsiness demonstrated by shareholder N-Trans in attempting a Russian equity deal in a month when six out of nine European IPOs were pulled, as well as for the speed and efficiency with which the four joint global coordinators – Deutsche Bank, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and Troika Dialog – built a substantial order book of primarily long-only investors from destinations as diverse as Australia, Canada, Singapore and Poland.
Acutely conscious of the narrow window of opportunity available before the summer slowdown and anxious to avoid expected market congestion in September, N-Trans and its bankers compressed the roadshow to just six days. Despite the short timeframe, however, the process comprised more than 100 one-to-one meetings worldwide, thanks in large part to Global Ports’ ability – also a rarity among Russian companies – to field three English-speaking management teams.
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Nikita Mishin, Global Ports |
“This means we were able to give very high quality presentations to investors simultaneously in different parts of the world,” says Nikita Mishin, chairman of Global Ports and a founding partner of N-Trans. “When investors are meeting the people who are involved in the day-to-day operation of the business it builds their confidence in the company.” Also crucial to the deal’s success was the well-publicized commitment of N-Trans to public ownership and its stellar equity market track record. The infrastructure group earned a solid reputation among investors for its listing of freight operator Globaltrans in April 2008 – the Global Ports deal had originally been planned for September of the same year but fell foul of the financial crisis – and its close involvement in the $388 million primary offering of transportation construction company Mostrotrest in November 2010.
“We knew we were in a tricky IPO market in June but we also knew that of all the companies in the Russian IPO pipeline that we had visibility on Global Ports was one that had one of the best chances of success,” says Richard Cormack, head of new markets ECM at Goldman Sachs. “It was a theme that investors like in terms of story and it was from a shareholder group whom investors know and which is known to want their transactions to work well, as evidenced by the performance of their previous deals.”
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Emerging Europe |
| Polkomtel/Zygmunt Solorz-Zak |
| Global Ports |
| Vimpelcom |
| Russian Railways |
| Return to the Deals of the Year main index |
