For us, the IPO was the only way to put AMAG on sure footing, which is why we bet heavily on this solution. And indeed, it was not a done deal for several reasons.
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10 YEARS ON THE STOCK EXCHANGE
On April 8, 2011, the time had come for AMAG’s eagerly awaited IPO to take place – in the middle of the crisis – a rough start. It was the first IPO on the Vienna Stock Exchange since 2007. The rest is history. CEO Gerald Mayer talks about how the IPO came about, the turbulent period preceding it, and the challenges afterwards.
The IPO in 2011 was the right decision. I’m totally convinced it was. If we hadn’t managed to go public back then, things would look very different here today.
Perhaps AMAG would no longer even exist in Ranshofen. This step allowed us to secure the autonomy and independence of the company and lay the foundation for everything AMAG is today.
The AMAG share price on the day of the IPO was EUR 19. The market situation at that time was not exactly rosy; both the Arab Spring and the Fukushima nuclear disaster caused further uncertainties on the market. That was also reflected in the share price. At the end of September
2011, the price per share hit a low of just under EUR 14. But that inauspicious trend didn’t last. Our share performed very well in the years that followed and is currently trading at around EUR 35 per share.
For us, the IPO was the only way to put AMAG on sure footing, which is why we bet heavily on this solution. And indeed, it was not a done deal for several reasons.
First of all, as I already mentioned, the economic situation was quite difficult. Barely any IPOs were happening at that time. There is a long list of well-known companies that called off planned IPOs in that period. Facebook was one of the few other companies that dared to go forward.
If you present shareholders with a 200 million euro idea that essentially comes down to “profitable, organic growth at the Ranshofen site” – but at the same time you have to say it’ll be several years before the returns from the multi-year expansion project arrive – then that’s a complex story, and not every investor would be willing to bet on it ending well.
That the IPO was able to succeed in this difficult situation is thanks to the strong support of many investors from Upper Austria province. First and foremost among these is the Raiffeisen Landesbank, which is still one of our core shareholders today, holding over 16 %. Without this support from our own province, we would not have been able to take that step towards independence at that time. After our IPO, the financial investor still held a stake of more than 34 %. The entry of B&C Privatstiftung in 2012 with a stake of around 30 % and several increases in the following years consolidated the stability of our Austrian shareholder structure in the long term. So uncertainties resulting from the unstable ownership structure were no longer an issue, and this created the basis for all the further development steps and our subsequent growth.
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