５つの上場延期などが出てきました。
これは予想済みのことでもあります。
本物のみが生き残れる。そういう時代です。
MARKETS DIRECT A BLAST OF COLD AIR AT CLEAN ENERGY STOCKS
The warnings at the bottom of investment advertisements often advise us that shares can go down as well as up. It is also true – even in the booming clean energy sector – that investor sentiment can blow cold, as well as hot.
For most of this year, the stock market has appeared to believe that clean energy stocks could only go up. The sector as a whole, measured by the NEX index, enjoyed a hectic ascent from 280 at the start of the year to a peak of 465 on 8 November.
Even in recent days, despite bearishness in the wider financial markets, the NEX has been relatively resilient.
However what has changed is that stock market investors have shown a
willingness to say “no” as well as “yes” to new Initial Public Offerings in the sector. No fewer than five IPOs, and one secondary share issue, by companies with clean energy links have been pulled in just a few days.
In the US, fuel cell technology firm NanoDynamics cancelled its flotation, which had been scheduled to raise USD 106.3m to pay for capital equipment and expansion of its manufacturing, research and development and sales capabilities.
Over on the other side of the Atlantic, Amsterdam based research house Avantium pulled the plug on an IPO targeting USD 29m to USD 43m of new money. A spokesman for Avantium, which is backed by a welter of prominent venture capital houses, said that the decision did not relate to market conditions in either biofuels or its other main area of activity, pharmaceuticals, but to “unrest” and “volatility” in financial markets.
In London, two Russian IPOs were put into winter storage. Russian Timber Group, a forestry firm with potential to be a big supplier of pellets to western Europe, had been hoping to raise up to USD 125m in a flotation on AIM, but said it had decided to postpone the move “in response to market conditions”.
Meanwhile New Russian Generation shelved plans to raise between USD 480m and USD 590m. NRG’s business model is based on owning shares in a portfolio of Russian generation companies.
In Italy, wind power producer Fri-El Green Energy had been scheduled to raise up to USD 676m in an IPO. However last weekend, Italian newspapers were reporting that it too was postponing its flotation.
Finally, in the US, electricity demand response specialist Comverge said that it had cancelled the sale of some USD 200m worth of stock. It had wanted the money to fund research and partly to enable some shareholders to exit. The company, which enjoyed a highly successful IPO on Nasdaq in the spring, blamed adverse market conditions that had pushed its share price down after its initial announcement of the follow-up share issue.
With these postponements in the air, and overall stock markets looking sickly in the face of the continuing credit squeeze, other clean energy companies hoping to float before the end of 2007 will be crossing their fingers.
Key flotations due to happen in coming weeks include those of Iberenova, the renewable arm of Spain’s Iberdrola, Australian wave energy firm Oceanlinx and Belgian wind turbine gearbox maker Hansen Transmissions.