The chairman of the management board of Euronext, has expressed Sunday his optimism regarding the pace of ipos. According to Stéphane Boujnah, it is expected to accelerate in the second half after a first half of the year slowed down by electoral deadlines. The operator of stock Exchanges of Amsterdam, Brussels, Lisbon and Paris has hosted fifteen companies for their very first stock Exchange in the first half for a total amount of funds raised of € 2.7 billion, down from $ 3.2 billion collected in the first half of 2016 for a number of operations the same.
“The markets are quite optimistic and there are a number of operations in the pipes,” said Stéphane Boujnah in an interview with Reuters in the framework of the economic meetings of Aix-en-Provence. “There are a lot of operations that have been delayed,” he said, referring to the “wait and see” is generated by the elections in the netherlands and in France. “I am extremely confident on the second part of the year.”
Euronext has embarked on a policy of reducing its costs since its own ipo in 2014. He wants to use his fire power to compete with more London Stock Exchange and Deutsche Börse. The operators of the stock Exchanges of London and Frankfurt had planned to merge but their project has been blocked by the european Commission, which has de facto annihilated the sale of the clearing house LCH Clearnet, LSE to Euronext for € 510 million.
An acquisition of up to 2 billion euros
“Our ambition is to deploy the balance sheet we have, because we have no debt, make significant acquisitions that would allow us to diversify our revenue base,” said Stéphane Boujnah. “We can, with the cash we have and the debt we can raise, mobilize an investment of between 1 billion and 1.5 billion euros and, according to the cash flows of the target as we could buy and, depending on the size of the support of our shareholders, (go) up to two billion euros on acquisitions,” he assured.
Euronext has already made some investment of less importance since the beginning of the year. He announced in may the acquisition of a stake of 90% to 153 million dollars (134 million euros) in FastMatch, an electronic communication network, to expand into the global foreign exchange market. It has also invested $ 10 million in Algomi, a provider of technology in the bond market, and 3.6 million euros in the Webcast, a Dutch company specialized in the links videos the internet for the professionals.
