Deutsche Börse drew a positive interim balance of the Scale SME segment launched on 1 March 2017. The trading volume of the companies that moved to Scale have more than doubled year-on-year in the first seven months since the segment’s launch, from €827 million to around €1.84 billion. The Scale All Share Index, which tracks all companies in the segment, rose by 28 percent during this period, significantly outperforming the DAX, MDAX and SDAX.
Given these developments, the segment will be further enhanced: A Scale selection index is scheduled for a Q1 2018 launch and is expected to contain 30 companies. With the launch of its service “Investor Targeting” at the beginning of October, Deutsche Börse has an additional offering aimed at making it easier for issuers to raise capital. Scale companies are being brought together with relevant investor groups at a series of events specially designed for this purpose and held in a variety of European cities.
The significant rise in trading volume shows that we have succeeded in bringing more visibility to those companies and considerably improving their securities’ liquidity in just a few months,” said Eric Leupold, Head of Pre-IPO & Capital Markets at Deutsche Börse. “We will use the Scale selection index and Investor Targeting to more prominently place the companies in the focus of different investor groups over the next few months.
Ulrich Weitz, CEO of Scale issuer IBU-tec advanced materials AG, took stock for the first time, noting, “The Scale segment proved to be the ideal capital market launchpad for us. We are very pleased to be able to draw such a positive conclusion about our IPO after the first few months.
Christoph Ohme, Portfolio Manager for German equities at Deutsche Asset Management, said:
We welcome the introduction of Scale specifically and believe it is important that smaller companies with great growth potential have gained a platform to obtain vital new capital for themselves through this segment. At the same time, Scale enables investors like us to invest in young, high-growth businesses. This segment has succeeded in striking a balance between openness to new companies and maintaining the necessary quality standards.
The research reports, which are obligatory for all companies listed in Scale and accessible free of charge, as well as the new DirectPlace subscription function allowing companies pre-IPO access via the stock exchange to additional investor groups such as family offices, asset managers and retail investors, have also been key factors in the segment’s performance. “Both services make the segment more transparent and are used extensively by semi-institutional and private investors,” added Leupold.
48 companies’ shares are currently listed in the Scale segment – at launch that figure was 37. The number of capital market partners that support companies prior to their IPO as well as during the entire listing period has risen from 34 to 60.
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