With two large-scale initial public offerings pending, observers expect new listings on the Helsinki Stock Exchange, which ground to a halt after the tech-bubble burst, will soon come flooding back in.
"It's been pretty calm here for the last four years. It's the only market in the Nordic region that has not seen an IPO since the turn of the decade," Petri Siponen, head of corporate finance at the Nordea bank, said, but added that now, "definitely the Finnish market is opening up again."
During Finland's technology boom, led by phone giant Nokia, a long line of companies, mostly tech start-ups, were listed on the exchange. Since then however they have seen their market capitalization evaporate or have simply disappeared altogether.
"We have too many usually technology-driven companies that were floated and have since shrunk to a minuscule size and are not very interesting to investors any more," Siponen said.
Last year was in fact so bleak that the Helsinki stock exchange decided to merge with its counterpart in Stockholm, following a trend of consolidation among Nordic firms that includes Nordea, operator TeliaSonera and forestry giant StoraEnso.
The Helsinki bourse "has a poor-balance palette of companies, and there has been flow from the exchange. Many companies have been bought up over the last three, four years and there has been a recognizable drain of material from the bourse," Siponen said.
With the turnaround in the overall economy things are starting to look up again however, and a number of new entities are set to go public in coming months, most notably the oil business of national energy firm Fortum and chemical group Kemira's fertilizer division.
"I expect [the IPO] to take place at the end of this year. The fundamentals in the market are looking very bright right now, and will continue nicely as we head into 2005," Derek Silva, an energy analyst with Evli bank, told AFP.
The listing is expected to fetch upward of a billion euros (US$1.2 billion), analysts said, and will bring Fortum closer to its goal of using mergers and acquisitions to become the leading electricity supplier in the Baltic Sea region.
"The aim of the transaction is to split the company in two, with one part focusing on power and heating, and the other on oil and refining, and creating two focused companies implementing their own strategies," Juha Laaksonen, chief financial officer of Fortum, said.
The other IPO set to make waves on the Helsinki exchange is the spin-off and listing of state-controlled chemical group Kemira's fertilizer business GrowHow.
Senior Kemira officials conceded that Norwegian Norsk Hydro's highly successful spin-off and listing of its fertilizer division Yara in March was key to their decision to do the same, allowing them to focus more sharply on chemicals production.
"It's pretty much a matter of sentiment, and the autumn could be much different. The two first IPOs could launch a wave of listings," Jussi Hyoety, chief analyst with FIM Securities, said.
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