Before the summer break, the latest IPO in Frankfurt was a disappointment.

After the unusually large number of newcomers in the first half of the year, the automotive supplier Novem made it with difficulty on the floor.

A special measure was required to get the project going.

Almost a third of the shares previously offered went from the left to the right pocket: Novem has been majority owned by the investment company Bregal for ten years, backed by the Dutch-German Brenninkmeijer family (C&A).

4.4 million of the almost 15 million shares placed came from an order from the family holding Cofra.

Klaus Max Smolka

Editor in business.

  • Follow I follow

On Monday, Novem made the foreseeable bumpy start on the trading floor.

The shares opened at 16.50 euros and thus at the level of the issue price, which had already been set at the lower end of the originally defined range.

In the early afternoon, the paper was quoted about 2 percent below this, although the overall market also tended to be weak.

In the meantime, the whole project had wavered because, according to reports, investors had surprisingly subscribed to few shares.

After the financial crisis, Novem was taken over by lenders from private equity and then sold to Bregal.

The company makes trim from wood, aluminum, carbon and plastic, from dashboards and center consoles to door panels.

Global coordinators and bookkeepers were JP Morgan Berenberg and Commerzbank;

Jefferies and UniCredit acted as additional accountants.

Mixture of many industries

The IPO follows an unusually lively first half of the year in the initial public offerings (IPOs) business in Frankfurt.

From an investor's point of view, they were mostly good business.

Before November there had been 16 newcomers to the stock exchange with an added volume of more than 9 billion euros, and ten of them were up with their share prices last week, according to Reuters counting.

The newcomers come from a wide range of industries: Vodafone launched its radio tower subsidiary Vantage Towers - in the largest project of the year to date.

Auto1 is an online car dealer, Bike24 in the bicycle market.

Synlab operates laboratories, Mister Spex sells glasses, Suse software.

Two candidates withdrew: the online car dealer MeinAuto and the solar and wind farm operator Blue Elephant Energy.

As an innovation compared to previous years, SPACs have appeared this year, special purpose acquisition companies that start empty on the stock exchange and then take over within two years.

Three such jackets are now listed in Frankfurt, two of them have already found takeover candidates who should end up on the exchange list in this detour.

Strongest year foreseeable since the new market

The liveliest year since the New Market boomed 20 years ago is emerging. The benchmark since then has been 2018, when 18 companies went public on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange with a cumulative issue volume of 11.3 billion euros - both brands are already not far away. And investment bankers speak of a considerable supply - in the technical jargon "pipeline" - of further Frankfurt IPOs. "The pipeline with further possible IPOs for German companies remains promising," said JP Morgan's Northern European capital market boss Stefan Weiner. “So far this year, the activity has mainly been fed by growth companies with a technology approach.” His counterpart at Credit Suisse, Joachim von der Goltz, says: “The pipeline looks very good.” In concrete terms, Bank of America (BofA) will:Your capital market manager for Germany, Austria and Switzerland, Thorsten Pauli, sees at least ten IPOs in the pipeline for the second half of the year.

Important factors are likely to be whether the IPO business will continue to benefit from the extremely lax monetary policy of the central banks - and whether rising inflation will put pressure on the stock markets. There are enough candidates, whether this year or next. This includes major projects in the automotive industry: the supplier Continental wants to spin off its Vitesco drive division, and Continental shareholders will then have Vitesco papers booked into the depot. Daimler plans to separate the truck and bus business in the same way. BASF is launching its Wintershall Dea oil and gas division on the market, but has postponed the step originally planned for the second half of the year until next year. According to reports, the BMZ from Karlstein is aiming for September, which will produce batteries for cars, trucks, e-bikes,Manufactures tools and medical equipment. Lesson Nine's stock market plan has a smaller dimension with the Babbel foreign language learning system.

International boom too

Business is booming internationally as well: According to calculations by the data service provider Refinitiv, the volume of spending all over the world - not including SPACs - in the first six months totaled 209 billion dollars, which is the strongest first half of the year since records began in 1980.

In New York, the securities broker Robinhood wants to take up to 2.3 billion dollars and be valued at 35 billion dollars, as it became known on Monday.

Deutsche Aktieninstitut recently expressed concern that high-growth young German companies were preferring the US market.

Underwriting banks and analysts have largely concentrated their business on larger companies, since smaller IPOs are not worth the effort for them.