The IPO of Porsche AG is apparently meeting with great demand from investors. The accompanying banks reported on Tuesday, just one and a half hours after the official start of the subscription period, that the order books were “many times oversubscribed across the entire price range”.
The owner of the Stuttgart sports car manufacturer, Volkswagen, is still offering 113.9 million Porsche preferred shares in a range from 76.50 to 82.50 euros until September 28. The demand for the papers is already well into the double-digit billions. In other IPOs, it often takes days for subscription orders to exceed supply. Numerous funds are waiting for this message before they take action themselves. A participating investment banker spoke of good demand from the United States and Europe, but also from Asia.
For around 40 percent of the issue volume – i.e. up to 3.68 billion euros – Volkswagen had already obtained firm commitments from anchor investors in advance. The VW major shareholder Qatar alone wants to subscribe to Porsche preferred shares for up to 1.88 billion euros. The Norwegian oil fund and the US wealth manager T. Rowe Price each invest 750 million euros, the Abu Dhabi sovereign wealth fund 300 million. With a volume of 8.7 to 9.4 billion euros, Porsche would be the largest IPO in Germany since 25 years.
820-page stock market prospectus
For the accompanying investment banks, the issue could save what has been a miserable year for stock market placements. IPOs, capital increases and package sales in Germany were pending until mid-September in view of the Ukraine-War at its lowest level in this millennium. As a reward for placing the shares, they can expect up to 125 million euros, as the 820-page prospectus shows. The IPO is organized by the US investment banks Bank of America (BofA), Citigroup, Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan. Eleven other banks are involved – also as a point of contact for small investors, whom Porsche is also courting.