Kaspi.kz (KSPI), a financial joint stock company, made its Nasdaq debut on Friday, 19 January 2024.
Kaspi.kz’s lukewarm market debut confirms investor caution
The Kazakhstan native’s shares topped the IPO price with 0.5%, giving the banking and fintech leader a value of $17.51bn. On the London Stock Exchange (LSE), where the company already trades, it has a value of over $19bn.
On Thursday, 18 January 2024, a day before the company went public, investors increased their offering to 11.3m shares instead of the earlier benchmark of 9m shares. The inflated IPO raked in $1bn for KSPI investors, fattening the bank balances of co-founder Vyacheslav Kim, CEO Mikheil Lomtadze and Asia Equity Partners, an investor in the company. Reuters indicated that none of these gains went into the company itself.
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Despite the S&P 500 just missing a record close on Friday, the KSPI IPO did not draw the anticipated attention. Analysts attribute this to the shadow cast by the past two years, which marked slow US IPO action.
The KSPI debut performance raises the question of whether upcoming startup IPOs, like Reddit and ServiceTitan, will follow the same pattern or if dovish hopes about the US Federal Reserve’s likelihood to cut rates will enliven IPOs.
KSPI’s American depositary shares (ADSs) started trading at $92.50, just above the set IPO price of $92. The organisation operates through three segments – payments, marketplace and fintech.
This is a plus for investors because the healthy performance of one division can prop up the poor performance of another. The downside is that an overly diversified outfit makes tangible market evaluations difficult.
