November 23 (SeeNews) - Bulgarian software developer Sirma Group said its shares started trading on the Bulgarian Stock Exchange on Monday under the ticker [BUL:SKK].
The company listed 59,360,518 regular shares with a nominal value of 1 lev ($0.54/0.51 euro), it said in a press release. Of the total number of shares listed, 9,523,362 are new shares which investors subscribed for during an Initial Public Offering (IPO) for 1.2 levs per share.
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By 4 p.m. the company's shares were trading 6.5% up at 1.278 levs per share as 3,690,978 shares had changed hands, bourse data showed.
Sirma Group's IPO is the biggest on the Bulgarian stock exchange for the past eight years.
"We hope we give other companies operating in the IT sector courage to follow our example, which will have a positive effect on both the Bulgarian stock exchange and on the IT sector as a whole," Sirma Group CEO Tsvetan Aleksiev said in the press release.
In September, Aleksiev said that Sirma Group will use the proceeds from the IPO to expand its presence on the US market, to increase its capacity, as well as to invest in research and development and in marketing activities.
Approached for comment, Dimitar Shuytsov, investment consultant at local brokerage Benchmark Finance, said, "Trading activity in Sirma Group shares on the bourse is particularly high today, and I expect it to stay high for another week or two after which it will steady."
"Sirma Group's successful IPO proved that companies can tap to bourse," Shuystov told SeeNews over the phone. "I am optimistic that we may witness more IPOs on the Bulgarian bourse."
In a separate statement released later on Monday Sirma Group said its nine-month consolidated net profit fell 69.7% to 2.4 million levs.
Sirma Group Holding, founded in 1992 simultaneously in Bulgaria and Canada, employs more than 300 and operates on five continents. The company is active in semantic technology, mobile applications, enterprise resource planning, business intelligence, electronic government, financial and bank services.
(1 euro = 1.95583 levs)