GP allocates private placement shares

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FE Report
The country's largest mobile phone operator Grameenphone (GP) has allocated its shares at a price of Tk 7.40 each after the shares being oversubscribed three times under its private placement offering (PPO), sources said.
The subscription agreement for the private placement came into effect Wednesday and will remain valid until today (Thursday), they added.
"The GP proposed a price of Tk 7 per share for the public at a discount of 5.40 per cent based on the weighted average prices of Tk 7-9 offered by the institutional investors earlier," a source told the FE Wednesday.
A total of 326,441,000 shares have been allocated for Bangladesh-based institutional investors and 23,310,900 shares for Grameen Bank borrowers and the employees of GP, he added.
The face value of a GP share is Tk 1.0.
The GP plans to raise a total of $125 million, of which $ 65 million will be raised through initial public offering (IPO) and the remaining $60 million through the PPO, the source also said.
The amount of $125 million is much smaller than $300 million, the company initially planned. The amount has been revised downward due to the current financial meltdown.
Earlier in July last, it planned to raise $300 million (Tk 2,058 crore), of which, $150 million was planned to be raised from the stock market and the rest through private placement.
The GP filed a primary application on November 12 to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) for launching the IPO.
Sources said the company is expected to enter the market under a book-building method by next year.
The SEC has already expressed its intention to introduce the method, a modern mechanism for IPO price fixing.
GP is the country's largest mobile phone service operator, having a base of 20.8 million subscribers in a fiercely-competitive market.