The online fashion retailer About You plans to go public in Frankfurt in the second quarter.
The aim is to raise at least 600 million euros from the placement of new shares, announced the daughter of mail order company Otto on Thursday.
The company, which was founded in Hamburg seven years ago, could be valued at around three billion euros, according to insiders.
About You is another well-known entry for the Frankfurt Stock Exchange - after the Linux provider Suse, the radio mast operator Vantage Towers and the online used car dealer Auto1 already dared to take the step this year.
In contrast to the Berlin competitor Zalando, which has been listed for years and is now considered a DAX candidate, About You focuses on the younger generation.
Company boss Tarek Müller is not worried about too much competition.
“The nature of fashion does not tend towards monopolies.” Müller also said: “We are now active in 23 countries.
Zalando is not in many of them. ”The biggest differentiator is About You's technology division.
About You has been selling infrastructure solutions for companies for some time and has won Marco Polo and Depot as customers, among others.
In the past fiscal year, sales in the corporate customer segment increased by 61 percent.
13 new countries in 12 months
In addition to the retail group Otto, the financial investor Heartland of the Danish entrepreneur Anders Holch Povlsen is also involved in About You. Povlsen owns the Bestseller company (Vero Moda, Jack & Jones, Vila) and has invested in Zalando and Asos as well as the Klarna payment service, among others. About You announced that existing shareholders also want to part with shares as part of the IPO.
About You intends to use the proceeds from the IPO to expand its international business and technology. “We have competed in 13 countries in the last twelve months,” said Müller. In the past fiscal year to the end of February, revenues rose by 57 percent to 1.17 billion euros, cracking the billion-dollar turnover for the first time. About You is aiming for an increase of between 40 and 50 percent for the current financial year. "We believe that an end to the pandemic will not affect us negatively and may even have a positive effect because people will shop more online than they did before the corona crisis," said Müller.
However, due to high investments, the company is in the red. In the 20/21 financial year, the operating loss shrank by 49 percent to 36 million euros. The IPO is organized by Deutsche Bank, Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan.