FILE PHOTO: A COVID-19 self-test kit is seen before being used by a teacher in Milton Keynes, Britain, January 28, 2021. REUTERS/Andrew Boyers
September 30, 2021
(Reuters) -Shares of Oxford Nanopore Technologies soared more than 45% in their market debut on Thursday, giving the biotech group a market value of $6.7 billion and showing increased investor appetite in life sciences companies listing in London.
The stock was trading at 619.9 pence by 0757 GMT and the company’s valuation was about 4.93 billion pounds ($6.74 billion). The initial public offering (IPO) price was 425 pence.
The listing marks a significant move for the London Stock Exchange as most British pharma and life science companies tend to list on New York’s Nasdaq.
“We are living on the cusp of the genomic era,” Chief Executive Gordon Sanghera said in a statement.
“Our focus remains on continuing to innovate, grow, and working towards our goal of enabling the analysis of anything, by anyone, anywhere.”
The company, which specialises in DNA sequencing and provides rapid COVID-19 tests to Britain’s national health services, sold 524 million pounds worth of shares in the IPO. It set its issue price towards the upper end of an earlier range.
The London Stock Exchange has had a strong run of IPOs in the first half of this year, with new companies raising $12.77 billion in the first seven months of 2021, the highest in seven years, according to Refinitiv data.
Oxford Nanopore had planned to issue 82.4 million new shares, raising 350 million pounds, while existing shareholders sold 41 million shares, it said in a statement.
($1 = 0.7311 pounds)
(Reporting by Yadarisa Shabong in Bengaluru; Editing by Arun Koyyur and Elaine Hardcastle)
