Zalando lists on Frankfurt Stock Exchange

Zalando immediately enjoyed a 12% increase on the issue price of €21.50, and shares were selling at the €23 mark after two hours of trading.

The company yesterday announced it had offered all permanent employees shares worth €180 and a 25% discount on further shares up to €720. More than 4,000 of its 7,000 employees were confirmed to have taken advantage of the offer. Zalando had already received a cornerstone investment of around €127m from investors including the Scottish Mortgage Investment Trust.

The greenshoe option of floating a further 3.7 million shares was exercised, seeing as the offer was reportedly oversubscribed by more than 10x, resulting in a total placement volume of more than 28 million shares.

At a listing price of €21.50 per share, the listing was set to net the company and its investors €605m. Zalando's offering prospectus stated it planned to use the proceeds for geographical expansion, as well as "expansion into new or related lines of business and selective acquisitions".

Following the flotation, Investment AB Kinnevik's shareholding will decrease from 36% to 32%, and Global Founders, the Samwer brothers' investment vehicle, will reduce its stake to 15% from almost 17%.

Holtzbrinck Ventures and Tengelmann Ventures saw their holdings reduced by a percentage point to 7% and 5% respectively.

Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs and Credit Suisse acted as joint global coordinators and joint bookrunners for the IPO. Deutsche Bank and JP Morgan were appointed as joint bookrunners, while Jefferies and Stifel Nicolaus Europe were co-lead managers.

Company
Founded in 2008, Zalando is an online retailer for shoes and fashion headquartered in Berlin. It sells more than 1,500 high-street and designer brands for men, women and children.

The company also operates sites in Austria, the Netherlands, France, Italy, the UK, Switzerland, Sweden, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, Poland, Norway and Luxembourg. It claims its three fulfilment centres are set up for expansion and will be able to handle approximately twice the revenue generated in the year to 30 June 2014.

Its e-commerce site receives 100 million visits per month and has 13.7 million active customers. The fashion retailer posted sales of more than €2bn in the year to 30 June 2014, having achieved turnover of €1bn in the first half of 2014. The DACH region provided more than half of this revenue, chalking up almost €600m in sales in H1 2014. Sales were boosted by around 30% from €800m in the first half of 2013. After six years of activity, the fashion retailer also posted a small profit for the first time.

People
Robert Genz and David Schneider are co-founders of Zalando. Lorenzo Grabau is CEO of Investment AB Kinnevik.

• Tweet  
• Facebook  
• LinkedIn  
• Google plus  
• Send to  

• Topics
• DACH
• Exits
• Consumer
• Germany
• IPO