SAF stock offering oversubscribed

  • 2004-05-27
  • Baltic News Service
TALLINN - An international stock issue of SAF, the Latvian subsidiary of the MicroLink IT company, ended successfully, as investors oversubscribed the issue 1.7 times, Suprema Securities, which arranged the issue, announced on May 24.

The price was fixed at 35 lats (52.87 euros) per share, which puts the sum total of the deal at 16.8 million lats.
The sum of the shares sold comprised 48.39 percent of shares in SAF and meant that MicroLink gave up its controlling stake.
MicroLink Group and founders of the company sold a total of 444,049 shares in the issue, and SAF issued another 35,000 new shares. It was expected that the shares would begin trading on the Riga Stock Exchange on May 26.
Suprema Securities said that 40 institutional investors, including those specializing in Baltic, East European and rising markets, as well as others from the IT sector, took part in the deal.
More than 35 percent of the demand was from Baltic, 24 percent from Nordic, 21 percent from British, 6 percent from the United States and 12 percent from Central European investors. Latvian retail investors and SAF employees subscribed to about 1.4 percent of the shares.
SAF Tehnika Board Chairman Normunds Bergs said managers of the company were satisfied with the share emission considering the pessimism on primary markets in the recent weeks.
"SAF Tehnika is now an independently traded company with a wide base of international owners," he said. "We are certain this will help us continue expansion of SAF operations on international markets."
SAF Tehnika develops and produces digital microwave radio links used in providing data and call communication services.