Airtel Money floats in London at a £5.3bn valuation as shareholders sell £529m of stock in the City's largest IPO for five years

Airtel Money has begun trading on the London Stock Exchange at £1.96 a share, valuing the mobile payments business at about £5.3bn. Existing shareholders sold 270m shares to raise roughly £529m, making it the first London flotation above £1bn since 2021.

Airtel Money is the mobile money arm of Airtel Africa, the continent's third-largest wireless carrier. The parent, which is majority-owned by Sunil Mittal's Bharti Enterprises, has itself been listed in London since July 2019.

The payments unit serves more than 50m customers across Africa and has been preparing for a separate listing for several years. It made its market debut on Friday 9 October.

The offer priced at £1.96 a share, giving the company a market capitalisation of about £5.3bn. The 270m shares on offer came from existing shareholders, a group that includes the Qatar Investment Authority and Mastercard, and raised about £529m.

On those figures the shares sold equate to roughly a tenth of the company. Airtel has previously said it expects a free float large enough to qualify for FTSE index inclusion, which leaves a place in the FTSE 100 open if the valuation holds.

The International Finance Corporation, the private-sector arm of the World Bank Group, took a cornerstone position of about 34m shares worth £67.2m. A further 8m shares were allocated to UK retail investors through the Retail Book platform, a tranche worth about £15.7m at the offer price.

The cap table carries a clear valuation marker from the private market. Mastercard invested $100m in April 2021 at a $2.7bn valuation and still holds just under 4 per cent.

First-day trading was subdued. The stock opened level with the offer price, rose 2 per cent and then slipped to trade about 2 per cent below it.

Suneel Hargunani, head of EMEA equity capital markets syndicate at JP Morgan, told City AM that demand came from UK long-only funds, emerging-market investors and fintech specialists. He described the deal as a barometer for the wider IPO market rather than for fintech alone, adding that each subsequent listing would have to be judged on its own merits.

Ian Ferrao, Airtel Money's chief executive, called the listing a "beginning, not a destination" and said the company would stay focused on building a digital financial services platform across Africa.

The flotation ends a long drought for the London market. No IPO there had topped £1bn since 2021, when Deliveroo and Wise each listed at valuations just short of £8bn. Deliveroo has since been taken private by DoorDash, while Wise has moved its primary listing to New York.

Attention now turns to the pipeline. Payments company Zilch took its first formal steps towards a flotation earlier this month and is understood to favour London, with a valuation of about $2bn in view.

Original source: City AM — https://www.cityam.com/airtel-money-set-for-5-3bn-valuation-in-biggest-london-ipo-in-five-years/