There is tremendous excitement in the bourse for the country’s second-largest mobile operator Robi Axiata’s initial public offering, which is set to eclipse its competitor Grameenphone’s Tk 486.1 crore listing in 2009.
Subscription for the IPO begins today and will stay open until November 23 for both resident and non-resident Bangladeshis.
Since the stock market regulator gave the nod to the listing, which will be the biggest yet in the bourse’s history, on September 23, about 1.20 lakh beneficiary owner’s (BO) accounts, which is a must to buy shares, were opened, according to data from the Central Depository Bangladesh Ltd (CDBL).
In the preceding two months, about 63,560 BO accounts were opened.
Market operators said the spike in BO accounts is to snap up Robi shares.
“Robi’s IPO is attracting a lot of interest from new and old investors,” said Md. Moniruzzaman, managing director of IDLC Investments, the issue manager.
The listing will significantly boost the bourse’s market capitalisation, he added.
Robi will offload 52.4 crore shares, which is about 10 per cent of its stakes, for Tk 10 each under the fixed price method to raise Tk 523.8 crore from the market.
“We are really proud to be the issue manager for this largest IPO. We believe this initiative will further foster the growth of the telecommunication sector,” said Arif Khan, chief executive officer of IDLC.
Robi has already allocated 13.6 crore shares to its employees and collected Tk 136.10 crore.
The stock market regulator has imposed a two-year lock-in on the shares; the duration of the lock-in period will begin from the first day of Robi's trading in bourses.
Talks of Robi's listing have been going on since 2013. The government has requested the operator on several occasions to go public, but Robi did not entertain it on grounds of not logging in profits consistently.
It raked in Tk 240.2 crore in profit in 2015 after two years of losses. Two more years of losses followed.
In 2019, Robi's profit stood at Tk 16.9 crore, down 92.1 per cent from the previous year.
The operator is having a good year though.
Robi, which has long been swinging from losses to profit and vice versa, logged in two consecutive quarters of profits.
In the first quarter, its profit stood at Tk 18.8 crore, when it was comfortably in the red a year earlier. Then in the second quarter, in the thick of the pandemic, its profit stood at Tk 58.4 crore, when it was in the losses a year earlier.
And last month, the operator finally hit the magical number of five crore in subscribers, making it a formidable challenger to Grameenphone, the undisputed market leader from the onset.
As of September, Grameenphone has 7.8 crore subscribers, according to data from the Bangladesh Telecommunication Regulatory Commission (BTRC). The other two operators Banglalink and state-run Teletalk have 3.5 crore and 46.1 lakh customers respectively.
Robi, which has been the biggest beneficiary of the government’s move to introduce mobile number portability facility introduced in 2018, was grazing the milestone in the earlier part of the year, but the global coronavirus pandemic played the spoilsport.
At the end of the first quarter, Robi had 4.97 crore subscribers, which came down to about 4.8 crore at the end of June.
Robi Axiata is a joint venture between Axiata Group Berhad of Malaysia and Bharti Airtel of India. Axiata holds 68.7 per cent controlling stake in the entity, and Bharti holds the remaining 31.3 per cent share in the company.
The company commenced operations in 1997 as Telekom Malaysia International (Bangladesh) with the brand name ‘Aktel’. In 2010, it was rebranded as ‘Robi’ with the company changing its name to Robi Axiata.
