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March 21, 2006
Loss-making Sandvine completes buoyant IPO
Shares in Sandvine, whose products regulate and control traffic on broadband networks, climbed today on its first day of trading on London's lightly regulated AIM stock exchange. The IPO price of 75 pence gave the firm a valuation of €124M. The share price was up by 25 pence to 100 pence at the time this report was posted.
The equipment vendor, which hails from the same hometown as Blackberry-maker Research in Motion (Waterloo in Canada) raised £20M (€29M) in a placing alongside its IPO. Plus it found new owners for some £5M worth of old shareholders stock.
According to a report on TechFinance Canada, Sandvine was loss-making and had sales of CDN $15.8 million, up from CDN $3.2 million in 2004. Its losses before interest, tax, depreciation and amortization amounted to CDN $3.0 million, down from CDN $6.2 million in 2004.
Sandvine raised $38M from its venture backers, which included Celtic House Venture Partners, a fund that has taken several Canadian telecoms equipment public via the AIM.
Celtic's founder is Terry Matthews, an entrepreneur-turned VC who is well-known in London, which might help to explain why the share offering was so successful. Matthews was born in Wales but made his fortune in Canada after founding several telecoms equipment companies there. He has streets named after him in Canada's capital city and is known as Sir Terry in the UK.
Alongside Celtic, the firm attracted other backers, including VenGrowth Funds, Newbury Ventures, Waterloo Tech Group of Funds, Business Development Bank of Canada Venture Capital.
Read - Sandvine Completes IPO on LSE-AIM
Posted on March 21, 2006 03:26 PM | Posted to IPO | Internet infrastructure | Permalink
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