Russia's Yandex debuts at a 38 per cent premium on Nasdaq
24 May 2011
Shares of Russian internet company Yandex NV, which raised $1.3 billion in its initial public offer, rose more than 38 per cent in early trading on the Nasdaq, stock market data showed.
Yandex, the Russian equivalent of popular web search engine Google, saw its share price rise to $34.65 on the first day of trading against its IPO price of $25 a share.
Yandex sold 52.2 million shares on Nasdaq to raise over $1.3 billion, 19 per cent more than initially planned. This consisted of 15.4 million new shares and 36.8 million existing shares, equivalent to 16.2 per cent of the company's enlarged equity of 321.2 million shares.
The share offer, which was underwritten by Morgan Stanley, Deutsche Bank Securities and Goldman Sachs & Co, was oversubscribed by 17 times, reports said.
Yandex's $1.3 billion offer, the biggest Nasdaq listing since Google Inc went public in 2004, comes on the heels of last week's record float by social networking site LinkedIn Corp.
The IPO valued Yandex at $8 billion, or around 500 times the company's worth when a group of private-equity investors led by Baring Vostok Capital Partners bought a 36 per cent stake for just over $5 million in 2000.
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